Last night former Gov. Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry went back and forth about what Romney actually wrote in his book “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” about Social Security.

 Perry said last night: “Governor – you’re calling it criminal – you said if people did it in the private sector it would be called criminal. That’s in your book.”

But Romney fired back, saying that Perry was inaccurately quoting him: “What I said was Congress taking money out of the Social Security Trust Fund is like a criminal, and … it’s wrong.”

In his book, Romney provides an example of what might happen if an average citizen were to do what he says the government does with Social Security – effectively “defrauding” the American public by spending the surplus raised by Social Security taxes on the budget and not what they should be spending it on: retirement security.

The example Romney gave in his book is this: Two grandparents go to their bank and create a trust fund to provide for their grandchildren’s education. As the kids grow up, the bank is spending the money from the trust fund on something else. When the kids are ready to go college, there is no money in the trust fund.

“What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money?” Romney writes. “They would go to jail.

“But what has happened to the people responsible for the looming bankruptcy of Social Security?” he writes. “They keep returning to Congress every two years.”