Romney was for raising revenues
before he was against it
Over the past few days, Mitt Romney
has been bragging about having gotten credit ratings agencies to upgrade Massachusetts' debt when he was governor:
The president really ought to personally sit down and meet with S&P. I did that when I was governor; I met with the ratings agencies and talked about our future and tried to instill confidence in our future.
S&P bumped the commonwealth's credit rating from AA- to AA under Romney's tenure, so he's got a talking point to tout, but the interesting thing is how he secured the upgrade. And as Ben Smith reports, he got it by pointing to increased taxes:
Gov. Mitt Romney lobbied the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s in 2004 to raise his state’s credit rating in part because Massachusetts had raised taxes during an economic downturn two years earlier.
The claim was part of a presentation to the ratings agency obtained by POLITICO under a state freedom of information law from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance.
Now, Romney opposes any sort of revenue increase—the sort of revenue increase that would have settled any open questions about our long-term fiscal security. It's the wrong sort of flip-flop, going from a reasonable position to the extreme, simply to win conservative votes in the primary.
Romney isn't the only one to blame, however. Just imagine how much different things would be if Republicans were open to raising taxes—or if Democrats had insisted on doing so last December, when they had the chance.
Of course, if we lived in that sort of world, jobs would be the top item on Washington's agenda. Instead, we're fighting over something that's easy to fix—and won't really be a major problem until several years from now.
