Can you say “out of touch”? I knew you could.
The Obama campaign has been hammering hard on Mitt Romney’s offshore bank accounts and his absurdly low tax rate and his car elevators and all of the trappings that make him a 0.1 percenter. I’m glad. It’s important that Americans know that Mitt is not a “regular guy”. He’s a massively wealthy millionaire that has always lived a privileged life.
He’s not one of “us”.
But there’s an easier way to learn about how out of touch Mitt Romney is: listen to Mitt Romney.
Check this out:
Mitt Romney disparaged President Obama’s call for a partial extension of the Bush-era tax cuts on Tuesday, saying that the middle class will be the ones taking it on the chin.“That will be another kick in the gut to the middle class in America,” Romney said on The John Fredericks Show, a conservative radio program based in Virginia, citing poor jobs numbers and continued unemployment.
On Monday, President Obama called for a one-year extension of the cuts, which expire at the end of the year, for Americans with incomes up to $250,000.
The average household income in America in 2011, and that includes the very poor and the über-rich, was $51,413. That’s about one-fifth of the level that President Obama is calling for taxes to return to Clinton-era levels. Don’t forget that our economy was booming back then.
Romney is so damned out of touch that he’s not even aware of the fact that a household income of $250,000 or more is a nearly unattainable dream for most Americans. For most of us, if we were making that kind of money, we’d consider ourselves handsomely wealthy.
But not Mitt Romney.
If Mitt Romney had to live on the paltry income of $250,000 a year, good Lord, he’d have to sell one of his mansions or something! He wouldn’t be able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars per year that he pays for his wife’s horse. He might have to [gulp!] get a JOB!
I was interviewed this morning by The Voice of Russia, the official Russian international radio network, and they asked me what I thought about Mitt Romney not releasing his tax returns for past years. Here’s what I told them:
Mitt Romney needs to release his tax records and he needs to do so soon so that American voters can have the full picture of him. The fact that he won’t suggests that he’s hiding something. We already know he’s stashing income in offshore tax havens. The question is how much and why? All of the currently available evidence suggests he’s doing it to avoid paying taxes in the USA and, if that’s true, it calls into question his loyalty to our country. If he’s doing things that make him wealthier and that push the burden onto the rest of us, why would we believe he wouldn’t continue to make self-interested decisions as president?He needs to come clean about his income and taxes.
Note that President Obama has released many years of tax records which is the norm for presidential candidates. Romney is breaking that trend despite the fact that he is reported to have released them to the McCain campaign in 2008 when he was being vetted as a vice-presidential candidate. If it was willing to share that information with the McCain campaign, he should be more than willing to share it with the Americans whose votes he is asking for.
Mitt Romney is NOT one of us. He’s not an average American. Mitt Romney doesn’t even know the definition of “middle class” anymore, if he ever did.
So, America has a choice to make. Vote for a man who knows what it’s like to live in the middle class, to have college debt, and to live like average Americans. Or vote for a guy who thinks making a quarter million dollars a year or more is “middle class”. And Americans need to ask hard questions about Mitt Romney.
He’s already proven that he’s willing to hurt American workers for his own financial gain. Why should we believe he wouldn’t continue to do that on a larger scale if he gets the keys to the kingdom?
