They started the Republican Recession by letting Wall Street crash the economy, sustained it with spending cuts that threw Americans out of work, and by their own admission, they’d bring it back.
Even Mitt Romney admits that more massive job-killing spending cuts will “throw us into recession or depression" — but he supports them anyway because he’ll do better if Americans do worse. So when they now talk about unemployment not improving faster, they’re not complaining — they’re bragging about their sabotage success.
ATTACKS AND RESPONSES
ATTACK: "Unlike Obama, Romney knows how to create jobs in the private sector."
RESPONSE:
- Does Mitt Romney know how to make himself and Wall Street investors very rich? Absolutely. Is he a voice for working families? No way.
- When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he claimed his corporate experience would help him create jobs. It didn’t. In fact, under Romney’s governorship, Massachusetts dropped to 47th out of 50 states on job creation.
- Here’s what Mitt Romney knows about our economy: how to help Wall Street make millions off of businesses that fail and make working families pay more so millionaires like him pay less.
- Americans need a president who fights for an economy that works for everyone. That means putting jobs ahead of maximizing profits for corporate executives and their wealthy investors.
ATTACK: "Let’s repeal jobs-killing regulations that are costing the economy billions."
RESPONSE:
- Republicans are seriously claiming that in order to create jobs, we need dirtier air and water, more reckless Wall Street banks gambling with our retirement, and more dangerous workplaces.
- What our businesses need are more customers — that’s why employers aren’t hiring — not regulations. And asking businesses to meet higher standards can put people back to work and spark new breakthroughs and industries.
- Freedom doesn’t mean playing the game without rules or a referee — that’s just the freedom to cheat. The laws we put in place hold reckless corporations accountable and help responsible businesses succeed by doing the right thing.
ATTACK: "All the uncertainty is harming the economy."
RESPONSE:
- What’s creating uncertainty is Republicans promising a repeat of the default crisis that rattled our markets and brought the Tea Party Downgrade — and there’s no doubt that sabotaged the recovery and did more damage to America’s credit worthiness than our debt ever has.
- Cutting spending means cutting American jobs, and we can’t cut our way back to prosperity. In tough economic times we should be hiring Americans, not firing them. Cutting jobs also takes away customers from our stores — and that means less hiring everywhere.
- Washington Republicans aren’t serious about deficits. They’re the ones who fought tooth and nail for the tax giveaways and two unfunded wars that exploded the deficit. Now they’re pushing a budget to actually increase the debt even more while throwing millions out of work.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
- Half of Americans believe that Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to ensure President Obama isn’t re-elected.
- GOP Speaker John Boehner recently vowed to hold the federal debt limit hostage again, in order to extract more cuts on the top of the $2.1 trillion in spending cuts they forced into last summer’s debt deal — even though taking more money out of the economy and cutting more jobs will harm the recovery.
- Last summer, the Republicans’ reckless political brinkmanship and threats to make America a deadbeat nation led to the first-ever downgrade of the country’s credit worthiness and a sharp stock market drop.
- Last year alone, Washington Republicans tried to kill over 7 million jobs.
- If Republican politicians hadn’t pushed so hard to lay off our teachers, cops, and firefighters and block efforts to put Americans back to work fixing our roads and bridges, the unemployment rate could be down to 6% already.
- In fact, if public sector employment had grown since the official start of the recovery by the average amount it grew in the three previous recoveries, we’d have nearly 2 more million jobs today.