This week, we finally heard from the real Mitt Romney.
A video released by Mother Jones shows Romney with his guard down, discussing his true beliefs among friends at a fundraiser. He didn’t realize that a camera was on or he probably wouldn’t have revealed his true feelings about half the country.
But, it turns out that Romney isn’t just out of touch with most of the country—he in fact also holds half of the country in utter contempt. Romney is recorded saying that “47 percent of the people” will vote for President Obama “no matter what.”
Why? Not because they like him or because they agree with his vision. And, it couldn’t possibly be because they don’t agree with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan that we should be putting millionaires, billionaires and corporations before everyday people.
No, 47% of Americans will vote for President Obama because they’re dependent on the government.
According to Mitt Romney—who is running to be the President of the United States, by the way—the President’s supporters are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.” And, he goes on to say: “[M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Romney isn’t talking about some small group at the political fringe. He specifically said 47% of all Americans—around 150 million of us. He thinks half of us are shiftless losers just waiting for a handout. And since we’re all so pathetic, he’s not even going to bother with us. As president, it’s won’t be his “job” to “worry about” what happens to us.
As Mayor Foxx said today: “this sort of disrespectful language has no place in a presidential campaign at all. It’s hard to be president of all the people when you write off half of them.”
The 47% of North Carolinians that Romney writes off as “dependent on government” includes:
The president has a responsibility to govern. If elected, he has to lead everyone, not just his friends. And, behind closed doors, Mitt Romney has proven that he has no intention of doing that.
Last month while visiting Raleigh, VP candidate Paul Ryan tipped his hat to North Carolina’s vast resources, talent and our stellar university system, stating N.C. is, “known for its research, known for its dynamic.”
What Ryan failed to mention was the impact the Romney-Ryan budget would have on the state’s public education system – a strong and extensive coordination that has allowed North Carolina to become a center of global commerce and the provider of good-paying jobs for hundreds of thousands of citizens.
North Carolina’s public education system, from pre-K programs to the research taking place on university campuses, has for generations been a gateway to middle-class economic security. Our commitment to education has also led to statewide innovation and investment, resulting in such areas as Research Triangle Park, which is home to 170 companies and 39,000 employees.
The Romney-Ryan budget would slash funding for early childhood education, eliminating up to 6,700 Head Start slots in North Carolina over the next two years. It would cut about $140 million in K-12 and special education funding, leading to fewer teachers and more crowded classrooms.
On the higher education front, the budget would make college less accessible by cutting Pell Grants by $830 on average for 254,000 North Carolina students and eliminating a college tax credit worth up to $10,000 for North Carolina families.
The public education system of North Carolina has already endured drastic cuts at the hand of the Republican General Assembly under the guise of balancing the budget. Instead, it leaves struggling public schools left to fail and puts students at a marked disadvantage in large classrooms and bills.
Mr. Ryan’s admiration for North Carolina’s talent, resources and economic vigor is duly noted and much deserved, however his and Governor Romney’s policies will dismantle the very institutions in place to preserve our position as an economic and educational powerhouse.
If this election were limited to women, President Barack Obama would win in a landslide. According to one recent poll, North Carolina women prefer the president by seven points. And it’s not hard to see why. Women have made tremendous gains under President Obama, especially in terms of pay discrimination. Mitt Romney wants to reverse those gains.
American women are paid less than men to do the exact same work. The difference is substantial: an average woman will make just 77cents for every dollar her male co-workers earn. North Carolina women fair just slightly better, earning 81 cents for every dollar. Clearly we still have a ways to go.
Pay discrimination has been illegal for decades, but the gender gap refuses to go away. President Obama took concrete steps to right this wrong: one of his first official acts was to sign the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It ensures that victims of pay discrimination can have their day in court, making it much harder—and much riskier—for employers to discriminate against the women who work for them.
Republican women in the U.S. Senate joined with Democrats to pass this common-sense law, but Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he would have signed it—even when asked point-blank in an interview.
President Obama has also championed the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would close loopholes that help perpetuate the gender gap. The bill would also raise the penalties for pay discrimination, giving employers a powerful incentive to pay women the wages they deserve.
Are these changes sensible? Yes, without a doubt. But not one Republican senator voted for it. Not one-including Senator Burr. Mitt Romney won’t even disclose his position on this legislation. When the Washington Times asked about Romney’s stance, his campaign refused to return their calls.
Last April, a campaign spokeswoman said that Mitt Romney “supports pay equity.” That may be true, but until he actually supports legislation to make pay equity happen, North Carolina women are right to be suspicious.
Mitt Romney likes to talk about equal opportunity. No opportunity is more critical than a good start in school and early education can put a child on track for a lifetime of success. As governor however, Romney cut pre-K again and again, squelching opportunities for thousands of children. Given the chance, he’ll do the same for children in North Carolina and across America.
In Romney’s first budget as Governor, he vetoed $10 million in kindergarten expansion grants. But what’s more, Romney actually tried then to end full-day kindergarten, and he also wanted to cut early literacy programs. Three years later, nothing had changed: Romney’s last budget cut pre-K funds by $13 million. By the time he left office, pre-K funding had fallen by more than $2,000 per child.
It didn’t have to be that way. In his last year as governor, Romney had a chance to fix things. The legislature passed a bipartisan bill creating universal access to pre-K education. Romney could have signed it; instead, he used a veto. Early education, he said, was just “another expensive entitlement.”
Today, not a lot has changed. Romney’s education plan is called “A Chance for Every Child,” but he’s still pushing policies that restrict opportunity for children. Under a Romney administration, the best-case scenario would be neglect: “A Chance for Every Child” contains 35 pages of policy, but it never once mentions pre-K or early education. The more likely outcome would be a torrent of cuts. In just one year, the Romney-Ryan budget would eliminate more than 300,000 slots in Head Start; that includes 6,700 in North Carolina alone.
Actions speak louder than words. Romney had a chance to expand early education in Massachusetts, a chance to build a legacy of opportunity. Instead, he left behind a legacy of cuts—and now he’s offering more of the same. It’s the wrong choice: children shouldn’t suffer because of our debts. Early education is not what you cut when you intend on investing in our state and country.
Mitt Romney has made his business record the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Yet the more North Carolinians learn about that record, the less they want to elect him CEO-in-chief.
It’s not hard to see why: Romney Economics is the same formula that benefitted a few but crashed our economy and punished the middle class.
This is Romney Economics at work:
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Romney Millionaires & Billionaires |
Middle-Class Families in North Carolina |
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Get a new tax cut of $250,000 per year on average.[i] |
4.1 million N.C. families pay higher taxes under Romney’s plan.[ii] |
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Wall Street gets to write its own rules again and gamble with families’ life savings. |
6.6 million N.C. families at risk of abusive lending practices and all N.C. taxpayers on the hook for future bank bailouts.[iii] |
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Corporations get to keep tax breaks for outsourcing jobs—and get new ones! |
More N.C. workers see their jobs outsourced and shipped overseas. |
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Can afford private preschool programs. |
Pre-K programs get slashed, just like they were when Romney was Governor of Mass. |
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Can afford to “shop around” for better colleges. |
Pell Grants slashed by up to $830 for N.C. students and the largest tuition tax break eliminated.[iv] |
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Insurance companies back in charge of health care decisions. |
Free preventive care eliminated for 2.5 million North Carolinians. |
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Can afford health care in retirement. |
Medicare as we know it is a thing of the past and N.C. seniors pay more for prescriptions. |
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“Let Detroit go bankrupt.” |
25,000 N.C. auto industry jobs lost without the auto rescue.[v] |
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Oil companies keep their lavish tax breaks, even when they make record profits. |
Families pay more at the pump. |
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Tax breaks on their multiple homes. |
Let the foreclosure crisis “run its course and hit bottom.” |
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Across-the-board tax cut for wealthy and corporations. |
Fewer teachers, police, and firefighters in N.C. communities. |
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Profits over people. |
The same failed formula that benefited a few but punished the middle class. |
[i] Tax Policy Center. “The Romney Plan (Updated),” March 1, 2012.
[ii]Obama for America, based on Tax Policy Center, “On the Distributional Effects of Base-Broadening Income Tax Reform,” August 1, 2012.
[iii] Obama for America, “President Obama’s Plan to Take North Carolina Forward and Mitt Romney’s Return to the Failed Policies of the Past,” June 2012.
[iv] The White House, “Consequences of the Ryan Republican Budget for Education in North Carolina,” March 29, 2012.
[v] Council on Automotive Research, “The Impact of the U.S. Economy of Successful versus Unsuccessful Automaker Bankruptcies,” May 26, 2009.
From education and healthcare to small business and women’s issues, Mitt Romney supports tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires over middle-class Americans. This philosophy is Romney economics, which benefit the few and leave the majority of Americans holding the bag.
Romney economics are at the core of MittAmerica. So, it begs the question, whose America is he fighting for?
Mitt Romney has withstood intense public pressure in the last three weeks to release his tax returns. Day after day, story after story, Romney and his campaign have renewed their refusals to release his tax returns.
They would rather their candidate be hit for not being transpaent than let the voters see the truth. The story has dominated the news and has taken his campaign off message for weeks with just over three months left until Election Day.
The question is why? What are they hiding?
A recent Vanity Fair article highlighted some of Mitt Romney’s finances. What we do know about his finances is that he has or had several offshore accounts in places like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland and that he has lower tax rate than most middle-class families. And now, there are questions of when Romney left Bain Capital and what really is the truth about his involvement in the company after his alleged departure.
Whatever they are hiding is so bad that the campaign will let the bad news cycles continue week after week. It’s obvious that they fear average voters knowing where his real interests lie. Mitt Romney has gone so far to say that if voters knew his plans if elected, they wouldn’t vote for him. The same must be true for his tax returns.
Paid for by the North Carolina Democratic Party