It's not exactly a flip-flop if you take both sides (Orig. photo: Pool/Reuters)



It's not exactly a flip-flop if you take both sides (Orig. photo: Pool/Reuters)



Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. [...] The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more. [...] Washington has been spending too much money and our new President made things much worse.

President Obama started out with a near trillion-dollar stimulus package – the biggest, most careless one-time expenditure by the federal government in history.

I'm not going to cut a trillion dollars in the first year. And I heard a question. Why not? And the answer is: taking a trillion dollars out of a $15 trillion economy would cause our economy to shrink and would put a lot of people out of work.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech in Iowa in which he vowed to cut spending dramatically and slammed President Obama for spending too much:Romney singled out President Obama's stimulus plan for particularly harsh scorn:Leave aside the fact that it was actually a $787 billion plan and that Romney himself had praised it in January of 2009. Instead, check out what Mitt Romney told a town hall audience last week about spending:So from one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama's "trillion-dollar stimulus plan" as the single worst expenditure the federal government has ever made. From the other side of his mouth, Romney says he wouldn't immediately cut a trillion dollars in spending because it would "shrink" the economy and "put a lot of people out of work." From one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama's spending policies threaten "what it means to be an American," yet from the other side of his mouth Romney says departing from those policies would be bad for the economy.

And the thing about Romney is that he says this kind of stuff every single day. Keeping up with his two-faced inconsistency is exhausting—and we've got nearly six more months of it ahead of us.