Laying Off Customers

CORE MESSAGE

Laying off firefighters, cops, and teachers is bad for business.

Connect: Any American business owner can tell you: our businesses need more customers.

Define: Mitt Romney's plan to lay off our firefighters, cops, and teachers wouldn't just hurt our families and our kids -- it would hurt our businesses, too.

Explain: Firefighters, cops, and teachers aren't just our neighbors, friends, and family -- they are customers in our stores. When they get laid off, they have less money to spend in them.

Bottom line: A dollar's a dollar no matter who's spending it. Businesses lose business when their customers lose their jobs.

Connect the dots: Mitt Romney's plan wouldn't just take firefighters out of our neighborhoods and teachers out of our classrooms -- it would take customers out of our stores, too.

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EYE ON THE RIGHT

ATTACK: "Obama's responsible for the 40% decline in Americans' household wealth."
RESPONSE:

• Actually, the entire drop in Americans' household wealth happened in 2008 -- all under George W. Bush's watch.
• But too many working families are still struggling and our economy isn't doing as well as the President wants, even though it has added over 4 million jobs in just the last two years alone.
• That's why the President's policies have been focused on getting our economy going again -- despite GOP politicians like Mitt Romney pushing to lay off even more Americans.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Consumer spending fuels the vast majority of our economy. In fact, the country's major metropolitan areas with the slowest recoveries had lost government jobs since total employment began to recover.
• While the private sector has added over 4 million jobs in the past two years, 600,000 firefighters, nurses, cops, teachers, and other workers in the public sector have been laid off.
• GOP leadership pushed for the public sector layoffs at the state and local levels that are dragging down the national economic recovery.
• These layoffs were entirely avoidable, but Republicans in Congress repeatedly blocked efforts to help keep our firefighters, cops, and teachers on the job -- against the wishes of the vast majority of the American people. Now they're pushing to throw even more families out of work.
• If GOP politicians hadn't also blocked efforts to put Americans back to work fixing our roads and bridges, the unemployment rate could be down to 6% already.
• Public sector jobs generate private sector jobs: if public sector employment had been allowed to recover normally, we could have nearly 2 more million jobs today -- including 500,000 jobs in the private sector.

We develop messaging by aggregating, analyzing and distilling polling, tested messaging, and expert recommendations, and monitoring the media to identify what is and isn't working. See here for some of the experts and organizations we draw on.