Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney laid out an economic plan on Tuesday that would cut the corporate income tax rate by nearly 30 percent, slash regulations on businesses, expand domestic oil drilling and weaken labor unions.
“America should be a job machine: jobs being created all the time, people looking for employees to join their enterprises,” Romney said, promising his plan would produce 4 percent annual economic growth and create 11.5 million new jobs in just four years.
As president, Romney said he would slash nondefense spending by 5 percent, expand free-trade agreements, impose sanctions on China over its currency practices and seek a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. He also promised to repeal the Democratic health care law that Congress passed in 2010 and overhaul the “Dodd-Frank” Wall Street reforms.
The former Massachusetts governor unveiled his 59-point economic blueprint two days before President Obama was scheduled to lay out his own jobs plan, giving the candidate a prime opportunity to contrast himself to the president — a strategy Romney hopes will convince voters that he could win the general election, according to Romney campaign aides.
Romney released his plan on the eve of the next Republican presidential debate to shift attention from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has surged ahead of Romney in the polls. Romney also hopes to position himself as the only Republican candidate with a comprehensive strategy to fix the economy.
Perry, who has taken a double-digit lead over Romney in the latest polls, immediately pounced on Romney’s plan.
“As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney failed to create a pro-jobs environment and failed to institute many of the reforms he now claims to support,” Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner said following Romney’s speech.
The Perry campaign also fired back at fellow Texan Ron Paul just hours after Paul put up a television ad blasting Perry for supporting Democrat Al Gore’s presidential bid in 1988, when Perry was still a Democrat. In the ad, Paul emphasized that he supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, but Perry’s campaign charged that Paul actually made a “broadside attack on every element of President Reagan’s record and philosophy” in a 1987 letter of resignation from the Republican Party.
Perry is playing defense as he prepares for his debate debut Wednesday, when, as the new front-runner, he is expected to be targeted by the rest of the Republican field.
“All the candidates are facing a different level of desperation over the threat that [Perry] poses to the entire field,” said Texas GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak.
The candidates are expected to attack Perry for allowing illegal immigrants to pay lower in-state tuition rates at Texas colleges and for dismissing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” While Perry touts his state’s No. 1 ranking in job growth in 2009, his opponents are quick to note that most of those jobs were low-paying positions.
The peril for Perry is that responding to his opponents’ attacks could throw him off message and lead him to make a major gaffe.
“The challenge for Perry,” said Mackowiak, “is going to be not responding to every single insult.”
