Mitt didn’t take his Medicare but he wants yours

If you take Mitt Romney at his word, he will gut Medicare, financial aid for college and nearly every federal program that helps working people in order to give millionaires more huge tax breaks.

The problem is: No one seems to take Mitt Romney at his word.

Last year allies of President Obama ran a focus group to find out what people think about Mitt Romney.

For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.

It’s too ridiculous to believe. More tax breaks for the rich—the hallmark of the failed Bush administration—paid for by giant cuts to the most popular government program among likely voters. But that’s exactly what Romney is for. And if he’s elected, he’s likely to have the 50 votes in the Senate he’ll need to do this and more.

And no one believes it.

That’s why the President’s allies have been focusing on Mitt Romney’s failed tenure as governor and his business history where he showed no empathy for middle class as he invested in outsourcing and in one case asked employees to build a stage so Bain could announce they’d all been laid off.

The President has a jobs plan that the GOP has refused to pass, instead focusing on pretending to repeal ObamaCare, increasing pollution and decreasing women’s health options. Conservatives in Europe and our own Federal Reserve Bank are conspiring to keep our economy stalled out, at risk of recession. None of this is the president’s fault.

So now is the time when we must make clear that what Romney is proposing, according to economists, will make things worse. How do we do that? Michael Tomasky explains:

So Obama and the Democrats’ No. 1 job is clear: tie all the Republicans together—Romney, congressional Republicans, and George W. Bush—and warn people about how much worse things could be. Romney is Bush on steroids. His tax plan is far more extreme. He wants to give millionaires an average—average!—tax cut of $250,000. The same plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Haven’t we tried this before, and didn’t it help lead—along with massive deregulation, which Romney also promises to pursue—to the biggest meltdown in 80 years?

The choice is clear in this election: The policies that created jobs for the last 28 months versus the policies that cost our millions of jobs and created the worst income inequality since the last depression conservatives let happen.

Our job is to make people believe that the GOP is actually serious about the nonsense they’re proposing.

[CC image by DonkeyHotey]