Romney says Obama’s tax cut extension will ‘kill jobs’
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- Previewing the message that he will bring Tuesday to the swing state of Colorado, Mitt Romney told a conservative talk-radio host that President Obama’s tax cut extension proposal would “kill jobs” and harm the middle class.
“What the president is proposing is therefore a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business,” the unofficial Republican presidential nominee told Virginia-based conservative radio host John Fredericks in a taped interview that will air Tuesday. “Small businesses are overwhelmingly being taxed not at a corporate rate but at the individual tax rate. So successful small businesses will see their taxes go up dramatically, and that will kill jobs.
“That will be another kick in the gut to the middle class in America. We just saw a terrible jobs report just last week, and now to add a higher tax on job creators and on small business is about the worst thing I could imagine to do if you want to create jobs,” Romney told Fredericks, who hosts the “John Fredericks Morning Show – Commonsense for the Commonwealth” on WHKT-1650 in Hampton Roads, Va.
The former Massachusetts governor added that he was “afraid the president, having never had a job in the private economy, just doesn’t understand the kind of difficulty it is to start a business, to grow a business, to decide to hire people … so he has taken action over his term that in almost every case has made it harder for small businesses and large businesses to grow.”
Romney was responding to the president’s announcement Monday that he would seek an extension of the middle-class income tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush. Obama said Monday that he hoped to extend the cuts for those earning less than $250,000 annually for a year.
House Republicans, along with Romney, favor extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts and are planning to vote on extending them for everyone later this summer.
But Obama has countered that Romney’s plans would favor the nation’s top earners, and he will advocate for his own plan Tuesday in Iowa by visiting with middle-class families to discuss the impact of the possible expiration of the cuts.
Twitter: @maevereston
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