Editorial: What we would ask Romney at the debate

• Voters need specific on which tax loopholes you'd cut.
• If you require insurers to cover sick people, you need an individual mandate.
• Exactly who are the 47% you said "believe that they are victims"?

Governor Romney, you say your experience salvaging underperforming businesses at Bain Capital proves you'll be able to turn around the enormously complex, $15.6 trillion U.S. economy. Why would your proposals to cut taxes and regulations, which are very similar to those of Republican President George W. Bush, somehow produce a better result?

• You want to extend the Bush tax cuts and reduce rates an additional 20%, while ending the estate tax, lowering corporate taxes and more. You say you'd make up the revenue loss by closing loopholes, but you and your running mate, Paul Ryan, have repeatedly refused to say which ones. The tax breaks big enough to do the trick include those for employer-paid health insurance, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, dividends and interest, and charitable donations. Don't you owe it to voters to tell them what they stand to lose, not just what they'd gain?
• Speaking of taxes and loopholes, the two years of returns you've released show you pay a rate of less than 15% on more than $10 million in annual income. Why should capital gains and the "carried interest" paid to private equity managers be taxed at a lower rate than regular wages and salaries?
• Ryan's plan to control Medicare costs — which you say is your plan, too — is essentially to shift those costs to beneficiaries and hope that their collective market power will hold prices down. If costs don't fall, the vouchers would grow steadily less valuable, forcing seniors to pay more and more of their income for health care. Isn't it a bad omen that "private" Medicare, called Medicare Advantage, is already more expensive than so-called government Medicare?
• Despite your repeated pledge to repeal ObamaCare, you said recently you'd keep a provision ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. But if you require insurers to cover sick people, without an individual mandate like the one you championed in Massachusetts, won't premiums go through the roof or companies simply stop selling policies?
• In the now famous video of you speaking to donors behind closed doors, you said you could never get the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes and don't plan to vote for you "to take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Just who you meant was a little confusing, because they could include seniors on fixed incomes, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and blue-collar workers with kids and small incomes. Exactly who are the 47% you said "believe that they are victims"?