President Barack Obama unleashed a direct personal attack on Mitt Romney Thursday, warning his multi-millionaire foe’s tax plans would swell his own wealth and make the middle classes foot the bill.
In a punchy new ad running in battleground states, Obama said the Republican’s tax proposal would hike taxes on families with children by $2,000 to pay for his $5 trillion tax plan which would mostly benefit the wealthy.
“You work hard, stretch every penny,” the ad said, showing a picture of a man working at a desk and a woman comparing tins at a supermarket.
“But chances are you pay a higher tax rate than him,” the sonorous voice of narrator said, as a picture of a smiling Romney, a former venture capitalist, flashed on screen.
“Mitt Romney made twenty million dollars in 2010 but paid only 14 percent in taxes — probably less than you,” the ad says — branding Romney’s approach as “He pays less. You pay more.”
The Obama camp is using Romney’s personal wealth, refusal to release more than two years of tax returns and complicated offshore accounting arrangements to paint a picture of him as out of touch with the hard-pressed middle classes.
The new ad came on the eve of new Labor Department employment figures, which if poor, could throw the political spotlight back on Obama’s economic record — the central thrust of Romney’s campaign for November’s election.
Obama based his assaults on a survey by the Brookings Institution think-tank released Tuesday which said that plans like Romney’s to lower rates and maintain tax breaks would spell “large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.”
Romney has proposed cutting income tax rates by 20 percent, eliminating tax on investment income, getting rid of the estate tax and cutting the corporate tax rate.
The Republican’s campaign dismissed the study, describing its authors as partisan and saying it considered only half of Romney’s tax platform.
But the survey was prime ammunition for the Obama campaign’s contention that if elected, Romney would further tilt the economy towards wealthy Americans at the expense of middle class voters still suffering from the recession.
As Obama headed to Florida on Thursday, Democrats gleefully circulated a picture of the front page of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper bearing a front page headline: “Romney’s plan will hit middle class.”
Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010 according to returns he has released, as his income from investments was taxed as a capital gain rather than under high rates due for salaried income.
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