By Daniel Strauss
Mitt Romney sent President Obama an open letter on Tuesday laying out how the former Massachusetts governor plans to criticize the president if Romney wins the Republican nomination.
The letter comes the same day that Obama visits New Hampshire to tout his administration's job creation plan.
In the letter, Romney first writes that Obama inherited a "hard hand" when he took office.
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But, Romney argues, Obama's attempts to fix the economy have not worked.
moreFrom the
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You and your advisors sold your economic “stimulus” package to Congress on the basis of a forecast that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent. There is a reason why this projection was wildly off base and that unemployment soared above 10 percent and is now stuck around 9 percent. Your stimulus bill was filled with special interest giveaways, and eased the way for your administration to shovel loan guarantees out the door to politically connected “green” technology firms, some of which are now in bankruptcy, with the taxpayers on the hook for more than $500 million.
Even where crony capitalism did not get in the way, so many projects were far from “shovel ready” or had absolutely nothing to do with creating jobs. Nearly a trillion dollars of tax dollars was spent, our budget deficit exploded, and some 25 million Americans remain either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work altogether. You placed a burden of debt on America that will take generations to repay and we got almost nothing in return.
You also failed to grasp the impact of your policies on the American business climate. Investment depends upon a degree of certainty, but your administration made it impossible for enterprises to make accurate forecasts about their future costs. If companies have stopped hiring in America, it is in no small part because of policies, including Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and an astonishing tangle of new federal regulations that have snuffed out investment. If we are ever to get America back to work, they all must be repealed.
I will also be talking about how you have catered to favored special interests, like civil-service unions and environmentalists, at the expense of American workers. Take your decision to “delay” building the state-of-the-art Keystone XL oil pipeline. Some 20,000 American jobs are at stake. You may not regard that as alarge number, but every one of the unemployed men and women whose future you have sacrificed to satisfy your political base in the environmentalist left deserve far better. And this is but one of many examples I can cite.
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You Don’t Know Mitt: 99 Facts About Mitt Romney4. Mitt Romney set up shell companies in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to avoid U.S. taxes.