By Max Pappas (citations in original article from FreedomWorks)
After keeping his distance from the tea party movement since its inception, the ever calculating Mitt Romney has realized he needs the tea party if he is to win his bid to be president of the United States. So he is going to speak at his first tea party event soon.
Reminder to Mitt Romney: The tea party movement is not only a reaction to the big government policies of President Obama and the Democrats who ran Congress from 2006-2008. It is also a reaction to the disappointment and frustration with big government Republicans like you, who ran the country too much like the Democrats for too many years.
To put it another way, we support free markets, constitutionally limited government, and fiscal responsibility and we oppose politicians from both parties who do not.
Romney does not, so we oppose him.
A few of highlights from Romney’s record showing just how unfriendly he has been over the years to the ideas the tea party holds dear (links and details further below):
- Romney distanced himself from Reagan and Reagan’s policies
- Romney didn’t like the Contract with America
- Romney led the fight for and implemented health care reform almost identical to ObamaCare
- Romney called his beta version of ObamaCare “a model for the nation”
- Romney defended the individual mandate, saying,
“I like mandates. The mandates work.”
- Romney supports cap-and-trade “on a global basis”
- Romney worked to regulate “greenhouse gas emissions” in Massachusetts
- Romney got Massachusetts involved in a regional climate change pact
- Romney supports ethanol subsidies
- Romney wants to increase spending “substantially” on energy research
- Romney opposes the Flat Tax
- Romney refused to support the 2003 Bush tax cuts
- Romney’s claim to not have raised taxes is called “mostly myth” by Cato Institute
- Romney thought Obama’s stimulus would “accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery”
- Romney supports TARP
- Romney says there’s nothing wrong with companies asking for bailouts
- Romney supports No Child Left Behind
- Romney supports reappointing Ben Bernanke to chairman of the Federal Reserve
Health Care
- In 2006, Mitt Romney imposed a health care law on Massachusetts that served as a blueprint for ObamaCare. NPR states that ObamaCare
“was based, almost line for line, on the Massachusetts model.”
- Obama thanked Romney for RomneyCare, saying at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Boston,
“Yes, we passed health care with an assist from a former Massachusetts Governor… Great idea.”
- RomneyCare, like ObamaCare, is based on an individual mandate, which Romney continues to defend. A presidential debate in 2008 featured the following exchange:
GIBSON: But Gov. Romney’s system has mandates in Massachusetts — although you backed away from mandates on a national basis.
ROMNEY: No, no, I like mandates. The mandates work.
- Romney encouraged a broader use of government forcing individuals to make government mandated purchases, saying,
“Everybody in our state has to have health insurance and that’s a model which I think has some merit more generally.”
- Romney’s plan, like ObamaCare, fines those who don’t purchase insurance that is officially approved and heavily regulated through an “exchange” and subsidizes with taxpayer dollars such purchases.
- Romney said of his plan, with its individual mandate, “exchange,” and heavy subsidies:
“If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation.”
Obama and the Democrats agreed and did so.
- The far-left was so excited about RomneyCare that Sen. Ted Kennedy made a trip to be at the bill signing and was all smiles as he stood center stage.
- Despite his previous suggestion that RomneyCare is a “model for the nation”, he is now trying to use the excuse that it was OK because it’s a state plan and states experiment. But it’s wrong for government at any level to violate our basic right to liberty by forcing citizens to buy a product as the individual mandate does.
- RomneyCare has failed, increasing health care costs dramatically. Between 2006 and 2009, cumulative costs increased by $8,569,000,000, emergency room visits are up 7.2 percent, and premiums rose 6 percent, according to the Beacon Hill Institute.
- In the wake of RomneyCare, the Wall Street Journal says Massachusetts
“is now moving to impose price controls on all hospitals, doctors and other providers.”
We can expect that nationally, too, if ObamaCare isn’t repealed.
- The Wall Street Journal offers more on RomneyCare, which they call a “fatal flaw” for this candidate, here.
Cap-and-Trade
- Romney supports a global cap-and-trade scheme and involved Massachusetts in a regional cap-and-trade pact. Romney was caught on video in New Hampshire in 2008 having this exchange with a potential voter:
Potential Voter: Do you support cap-and-trade?
Romney: I support it on a global basis
- Romney won praise from global warming profiteer Al Gore for saying, “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you’re seeing.”
- In 2008, Romney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “there’s nothing wrong with dealing with global warming.”
- In 2004, as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney introduced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan to reduce greenhouse gases. The Heartland Institute finds,
“Though mostly voluntary, some provisions of the plan are mandatory and will impose economic hardship on Massachusetts citizens.”
- Romney’s plan, much like the widely rejected Kyoto Protocol states its goals as
- SHORT-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2010.
- MEDIUM-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions 10% below 1990 levels by the year 2020.
- LONG-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions sufficiently to eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate; current science suggests this will require reductions as much as 75-85% below current levels.
- Having pushed carbon regulations Obama could only dream of, Romney uttered this line, which sounds eerily like what Obama would say,
“These carbon emission limits will provide real and immediate progress in the battle to improve our environment… They help us accomplish our environmental goals while protecting jobs and the economy.”
- According to Sandy Liddy Bourne of the American Legislative Exchange Council,
“The Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan can be compared to a slick advertisement with no price tag. It is packaged with the same doom and gloom rhetoric of the environmental activists and commits the state government to long-term contracts for renewable energy without the benefits of a free market check-and-balance system.”
Ethanol
- Romney makes no bones about it, he supports ethanol subsidies. “I support the subsidy of ethanol,” he told an Iowa voter. “I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.”
- Romney goes so far as to support trade barriers on ethanol.
- Romney also supports energy subsidies in general, unequivocally stating in his 2008 campaign platform a need for a “dramatic” increase in “federal spending on research, development, and demonstration projects that hold promise for diversifying our energy supply.”
Taxes
- Romney refused to support the Bush tax cuts in 2003.
- Romney strongly opposes the pro-growth Flat Tax. So much so that he, as a “concerned citizen” ran a newspaper ad opposing it. He said, “I’m probably not going to be recommending throwing out the code and starting over” and says the flat tax is “unfair.”
- In 2002, while Romney was running for governor, limited government activists in Massachusetts were supporting Ballot Question 1 to eliminate he state income tax. Forty five percent of the voters supported eliminating the tax, Romney opposed eliminating it.
- When Romney ran for governor in 2002, he refused to sign a no-tax pledge.
“I’m not intending to, at this stage, sign a document which would prevent me from being able to look specifically at the revenue needs of the Commonwealth.”
- Romney enacted $432 million in fee hikes and $300 million in higher taxes as governor of Massachusetts.
- In a recent “Fiscal Policy Report Card” on governors, The Cato Institute, gave him a “C.” As far as the image Romney cultivates as “a governor who stood by a no-new-taxes pledge,” Cato called it “mostly a myth.” As evidence, they cited the hefty fee increases and business tax hikes achieved through the closing of loopholes.
- Romney proposed a tax shift that would have increased taxes on SUVs.
- Romney instituted a 2-cent-per-gallon increase on a special gasoline fee that takes in $60 million per year.
Spending
- As Governor, Romney proposed a budget in 2007 that was an outrageous 8.5 percent higher than the one he proposed the year before.
- Romney, despite calls from many fiscal conservatives to keep everything on the table when looking for spending cuts, recently stated that “I’m not going to cut the defense spending.”
- Romney parroted discredited Keynesian economic thinking when he wrote in No Apology,
“The ‘all-Democrat’ stimulus that was passed in early 2009 will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.”
- Romney sounds a lot like Obama when he says in an op-ed to what was surely a fawning New York Times audience,
I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today.
The Wall Street Bailout
- Romney supports the Wall Street Bailout/TARP program. In his book No Apology he says:
Secretary [Hank] Paulson’s TARP prevented a systemic collapse of the national financial system.
It was intended to prevent a run on virtually every bank and financial institution in the country.
Had we not taken action, you could have seen a real devastation.
- Romney reaffirmed this position in 2009 saying, “I believe that it was necessary to prevent a cascade of bank collapses.”
More Mitt, More Problems
- Romney supports federal involvement in education, long held by constitutional conservatives as a state prerogative, offering his support for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind law. In a 2008 debate, Romney stated, “I supported No Child Left Behind, still do.”
- Romney ran on raising the minimum wage and putting in place automatic increases by indexing it to inflation.
- Romney signed in to law a smoking ban.
- Romney thinks it’s OK for companies to ask for bailouts, stating in a New York Times op-ed about the auto bailout, “It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition”
- In April 2009, Romney told The Hill newspaper that:
“We as Republicans misspeak when we say we don’t like regulation. We like modern, up-to-date dynamic regulation that is regularly reviewed, streamlined, modernized and effective.”
- On Neal Cavuto on January 28 2010, Romney supported the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to chairman of the Federal Reserve.
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