The presidential debate Wednesday night highlighted just how fundamentally the two presidential candidates differ on how to relieve the nation’s debt crisis.

At one point in the debate, moderator Jim Lehrer posed the question: “What are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?”

Robert Calcagno | Daily Trojan

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney responded that bringing down the deficit is both a moral and economic issue.

“It’s, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they’re going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives,” Romney said. “And the amount of debt we’re adding, at a trillion [dollars] a year, is simply not moral.”

Though Romney was well-spoken and poignant during the debate, conflicting statements about education and a vague economic plan indicate a critical lack of understanding and his inability to put forward a policy that will truly lessen future generations’ debt burden.

Romney’s five-point plan promises 12 million new jobs over the next four years. To fulfill this promise, Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion. The tax cuts are mostly for the wealthiest Americans, leaving an ever-growing financial burden on the lower and middle classes. This is not a step forward for the millions of young Americans who will have to or are currently taking on student debt, but an additional financial burden that students and future generations will all have to face if Romney is elected president.

Though neither candidate touched on the issue of student debt much in the debate, it is key to understand the difference between their approaches to the topic as it directly impacts future generations. Romney plans to reverse two concrete, beneficial steps President Barack Obama took to relieve current and future students’ debt — lowering the loan payment cap to 10 percent of income and decreasing the required number of years for an unpaid student loan to be forgiven from 25 to 20.

Throughout the debate, Romney often dodged the question of student debt entirely. In the beginning of Obama’s second two-minute segment, Obama said that he “want[s] to make sure to keep tuition low for our young people.”

Romney’s following two minutes focused on anything but rising tuition costs — rather, he returned to taxes, middle-income families and energy policy. Granted, Obama didn’t delve any deeper into the issue, but at least he mentioned it.

And immediately after preaching that “education is key,” Romney advocated cutting federal training and education programs. But he later said he has no plan to cut education or student loan grants, although he had previously endorsed vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which includes $170 billion in Pell Grant cuts. Hypocritical logic such as this is far from presidential, and even farther from the solid economic reform that future generations need to lessen their debt burden.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior advisor, told reporters after the debate that Romney “came to give a performance and gave a good performance and we give him credit for that. The problem is that none of it was rooted in fact.”

Unlike Romney, Obama has taken many clear-cut steps that directly alleviate younger generations’ debt burden, including a student loan package that prevented loans rates from doubling and a health care act that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans until they’re 26 years old.

Though polls show that Romney came out as the winner of the debate, his economic vision is not compatible with the needs of current and future students — the future generation that will have to live, study and work under this policy should he be elected president.

Elena Kadvany is a senior majoring in Spanish and is the Daily Trojan’s editorial director.  Point/Counterpoint runs Fridays.