Last week’s debate had President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney sparring over which candidate’s jobs plan would put the most people back to work.

But economic experts cast doubt on how much any president can do to create jobs, which depend on multiple factors often out of reach of the nation’s chief executive.

Romney, a former businessman, has argued throughout his campaign that he knows about job creation, and he’d add 12 million jobs during his first term through a combination of tax cuts, moves to stimulate energy independence, deficit reduction and increased trade.

Obama’s jobs plan, introduced in legislation last year, would include training for workers in high-demand industries and more short-term stimulus spending. Jobs are coming back — albeit slowly — he has said, and he needs more time to finish the job he set out to do.

But economists have been critical of the lack of specifics coming out of both camps, and are skeptical given the political climate that either candidate would get his plan through Congress.

“These are not plans,” said Edward W. “Ned” Hill, dean of the College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. “These are two different economic cartoons.”

Hill said any sweeping proposals don’t stand a chance in a polarized Congress, and the candidates are avoiding mentioning specifics because they don’t want to lose votes. Romney, in fact, started a Twitter frenzy during the debate simply by mentioning that he would cut the federal government’s subsidy to National Public Radio, thereby killing funding for Big Bird.

Both candidates are proposing ways to stimulate job growth, but economists say the right set of factors have to be in place for that to happen. For example, both candidates Wednesday talked about reducing corporate taxes — Obama made an exception by saying he’d close loopholes for oil and gas companies and companies that ship jobs overseas. But economists argue that a business that doesn’t need more workers won’t hire them just because its taxes are lower. It is more likely just to bank the cuts. And if it does that, how does that encourage job growth?

Economists also poke holes in Obama’s stimulus plan. The stimulus would essentially create government-subsidized jobs for displaced workers who would then be expected to spend more money, stimulating demand for goods and services that would help businesses grow and hire more workers. But people are generally gun shy about spending after a bout with unemployment and tend to hold onto their money. So stimulus alone really can’t sustain job growth, experts say, and may not pump the desired amount of money into the economy.

The veracity of both campaigns’ promises will be depend largely on underlying market forces, not presidential mandates, because the government’s ability to create jobs without directly hiring more workers is limited — regardless of who’s in charge, said Ken Mayland of the forecasting firm ClearView Economics in suburban Cleveland.

“The basic force behind job production is the business cycle,’’ or fluctuations in economic activity, Mayland said. “Politicians and their policies work on the margins of that cycle.”

Slow job growth

Despite the government’s best efforts, including the Federal Reserve’s commitment to keep interest rates low to encourage businesses to expand, job growth has been painfully slow in most parts of the country.

Since the recovery began in June 2009, the economy has added about 140,000 jobs a month, based on the latest figures available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s barely enough to keep pace with the growth of the working-age population.

The September jobs report, released Friday, did little to change the slow pace of hiring.

And while the unemployment rate has come down from 9.5 percent to 8.1 percent, that’s largely because millions of workers have dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed.

Ohio has shown stronger job growth than most other states over the past year, thanks largely to a resurgent auto industry, which accounts for as much as one in eight jobs in Ohio, according to estimates from Republican Governor John Kasich’s office.

Ohio added 98,300 jobs through the 12 months that ended in August, ranking the state No. 4 for total job growth over that period. But even at that pace, it will take more than two years to generate the additional 232,800 jobs needed to return Ohio to pre-2007 recession levels of employment, according to a recent analysis from the left-leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio.

Opposing plans

Obama’s jobs plan, introduced last year in Congress, would include $35 billion to stop the layoffs of teachers and first responders and hire more of each. He’d create a “returning heroes” tax credit to encourage companies to hire unemployed veterans and invest in infrastructure in hopes of creating between 1 million and 1.9 million new jobs.

He’d also overhaul the unemployment insurance program, investing in programs to better prepare the unemployed for jobs. And he’d double-down on efforts to promote green technologies and invest in education in hopes of better matching employee skills with the available jobs in the U.S. workforce.

Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget policy analyst for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said Obama is smart to invest in infrastructure, which will create jobs while improving public works projects such as highways and bridges. The mixture of public and private sector spending is “very much Keynesian,” he said, and would have resulted in nearly 1.7 million jobs had Congress passed the original act last year.

But Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst for tax policy with the conservative Heritage Foundation, favors Romney’s approach, saying his focus on spending cuts may be one of the best things he can do for the economy. The impending debt crisis is creating uncertainty that’s keeping companies from creating jobs, he said.

“Governor Romney has indicated a willingness to take on Social Security reform and has embraced an approach to the conservative plan for reforming Medicare,” he said.

Obama and Romney debated at length about Medicare last week, which is emerging as a big issue in swing states such as Ohio and Florida.

Romney touts a five-part plan that he says will create jobs and stimulate the economy by reducing the corporate income tax to 25 percent — Obama has proposed cutting it to 28 percent — cutting non-discretionary spending, directing the Department of Energy to survey American energy reserves with exploration companies, consolidating federal retraining programs and reinstating the president’s Trade Promotion Authority to start negotiating new trade agreements.

He has said he would call China a “currency manipulator,” which could force countervailing duties on Chinese-made products.

Beyond that, he’d issue executive orders to end the Obama health care law and dial back federal regulations in hopes of providing some certainty to businesses trying to decide whether to hire more people.

He promises 12 million new jobs within the next four years, but that’s a less impressive number than it sounds: Economic forecaster Moody’s Analytics predicted the same level of job growth over the next four years regardless of who is in the White House.

Tax cuts

Taxes are always a battleground in presidential politics, and it dominated much of last week’s debate, with Obama claiming Romney wants a $5 trillion tax cut and Romney saying his tax proposals are revenue neutral, meaning they won’t add to the deficit.

The two candidates’ tax plans are very different.

Obama advocates keeping tax rates the same for families making less than $250,000 a year. For families earning more than that, he’d let the 2001 and 2003 income and investment tax cuts expire on schedule at the end of the year.

Obama has also called for ending corporate tax loopholes, including tax provisions that help oil and gas companies. He has endorsed the so-called “Buffett Rule,” which would require households making more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. And he would lower the top corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent.

Under Obama’s plan, businesses would get a 20 percent income tax credit for moving operations into the United States, but companies moving abroad would see their tax deductions decrease.

He’d also raise the estate tax back to 45 percent after a $3.5 million exemption. Right now, the estate tax rate is 35 percent after the first $5 million.

Romney, meanwhile, said he would fight to cut all income tax rates by 20 percent across the board. He’d maintain the current tax rates on interest, dividends and capital gains, eliminate the estate tax and repeal the alternative minimum tax. He said if he were elected, he’d cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, strengthen and make permanent the research and development tax credit and repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax. The approach wouldn’t add to the deficit, he has said, because the costs would be offset by eliminating some deductions, though he hasn’t said which deductions he’d eliminate.

The impact of tax cuts on job growth will be hotly debated over the next month, with each side quoting studies that support their ideological viewpoint.

In a report co-authored by Fieldhouse, the Economic Policy Institute said Romney’s plan would create only 87,000 jobs in 2013 – far below the pace needed to create 12 million jobs over four years. The lower jobs estimate was attributed to cuts in discretionary spending — a key part of the Romney five-part plan — and tax cuts, which Fieldhouse said can stimulate an economy but often fall short of their projected target for creating jobs.

“Tax cuts are incredibly expensive, but they yield very little economic activity per dollar,” Fieldhouse said.

Dubay, on the other hand, argues that the Romney plan will eliminate some of the uncertainty that has kept businesses from adding jobs.

“As in life you can only worry about what you can control,” he said. “And Washington controls a good deal of the uncertainty plaguing business right now.”

Staff Writer Randy Tucker contributed to this report