Two recent national polls show a narrow gap between Romney and Obama on the deficit. Romney seems to have lost his advantage after weeks of being pilloried by Democrats for his policies, which they claim would cut taxes on the rich, raise taxes on the middle class and cost seniors more for health care.
Conservatives and independent analysts, meanwhile, have been increasingly questioning whether Romney’s proposals are detailed enough to justify their claims.
The cumulative effect seems to be taking a toll on Romney’s reputation as someone who will fix the nation’s debt burden. Just as voters are beginning to pay close attention to the election, the fiscal problems of Europe are dominating the headlines, and the end-of-year “fiscal cliff,” with a recession-inducing series of tax hikes and spending cuts, comes into focus.
Obama and Romney each claim to have a plan that will the cut the debt by about $4 trillion over the next decade, which would be roughly enough to stabilize the size of the debt compared with the overall economy.
To close the gap, Obama calls for tax hikes on the wealthy, spending cuts and modest changes to entitlements. Romney relies solely on spending reductions.
Although Americans support deficit reduction, polls show they do not favor cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare. They do, however, support raising tax rates on the wealthy to close the deficit .
“Even if they agree with the approach he says wants to take [to reduce the deficit], they don’t believe he’s going to follow through,” said Jonathan Burks, deputy policy director of Romney’s campaign.
Critics point out that Obama has far from a perfect record on the debt. The country added about $4 trillion to its debt during Obama’s term, in part because of the recession, and he failed to live up to his promise to halve the deficit. He also didn’t fully embrace the report of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission he created, a frustration for many of the president’s supporters in the business community.
“The president would attract more CEOs if he’d adopt Simpson-Bowles,” said Marc Benioff, an Obama campaign co-chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com. “I’ve told the president that I felt that is the right plan. He should reconsider his position.”
The president last summer sought and failed to strike a “grand bargain” to trim $4 trillion from the federal debt in negotiations, an achievement that his political advisers have said would have provided a major boon to his reelection campaign.
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