Tag Archives: prove it

Romney-Ryan’s very bad Thursday: Mitt’s tax returns and Ryan’s Medicare plan

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“We’ll believe it when we see it. Until Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, Americans will continue to wonder what he’s hiding.” -- Harry Reid, clearly amused by Mitt Romney’s revelation earlier in the day…

Buzzfeed reports that Mitt Romney went “off-script” yesterday during a press conference at the Greer, S.C. airport, during which he planned to wonk-out for reporters — with a white board, marker, and eraser — and explain his Medicare program. Instead, this happened:

…a reporter asked him whether he had reviewed his tax returns to find out how much he’d paid, as he promised ABC News he would when he was in Israel. Apparently frustrated with the distraction from his Medicare message, Romney bristled at the question, calling it “small-minded” — and then spontaneously offered new details on his personal finances.

“I did got back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years, I never paid less than 13 percent,” he said. “I think the most recent years is 13.6 percent or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s charge is totally false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way.”

See? I’ll bet that if President Obama said things and wanted Republicans to just take his word for it about the things, that would be good enough for the GOP — so why isn’t that good enough for Harry Reid and Democrats!?

Buzzfeed continues with Master Paul Ryan, who was supposed to flash his foreign diplomacy bona fides by talking about China:

Paul Ryan bought a reporter a hot dog for his birthday and answered an off-message question. And so the campaign, yet again, lost control of its story, with Romney making news on his personal tax returns, and Ryan offering a complex defense of his views on Medicare. And questions about the wisdom of picking a policy visionary for a running mate and then rejecting the specifics of his detailed vision grew deeper. [... Moody asked] Ryan to explain why he had included $716 billion in cuts to planned Medicare spending in his famous budget plan, if he now opposes it. Ryan’s answer, couched in the process-heavy language of Capitol Hill, was that it wasn’t his fault the cuts had already been priced into the “baseline” and that while relying on them, he had also opposed them when they passed as part of ObamaCare. Forget China: Medicare drove the day in Ohio.

Maybe in Ohio, but by that evening Think Progress noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS Evening News all led with Romney’s tax returns.

Go Romney! Where are the tax returns? This election could be a referendum on what percentage of income you’ve paid for 10 years, compared to the rest of us — and how maybe, possibly, potentially we might think those tax laws are unfair and want to change them.

Reince Priebus calls Harry Reid a “dirty liar.” Why won’t Mitt Romney man up and prove it?

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The first week in July, the RNC’s own Reince Priebus went on Fox “News” Sunday and said the president “isn’t living on planet Earth,” repeatedly criticized the last four years as a “misery,” and called Obama “the most divisive, nasty, negative campaigner” in the nation’s history. Today he went on ABC’s This Week to call Harry Reid a “dirty liar.”

You know what, Reince Priebus? Have Mitt Romney PROVE Harry Reid’s a dirty liar.

Reid Spokesman Adam Jentleson struck back at Priebus by calling Romney “the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon,” and went on to say it’s sad that Romney has “forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns..”

Republicans can try to cover up for Mitt Romney’s stonewalling all they want, but this issue is not going away until Romney decides to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns.  It is sad that the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon has forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns.  As Senator Reid has said, an extremely credible source informed him that Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for ten years. From the one year of returns Romney has released, we’ve seen that he uses secret offshore accounts in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes.  It’s clear Mitt Romney is hiding something, and the only way for him to clear this up is to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns.

How on earth the GOP voting base can be satisfied by this level of secrecy and dishonesty in their presidential candidate is really a testament to their own levels of pathological ideology trumping everything else that should matter to Americans. Keep defending the indefensible and see how far that gets you.