The VP Debate Tonight

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OUR CHOICE

Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan makes America's choice clear.

• It's a choice between leaders who look out for regular Americans and prove it with their policies -- or politicians who look out for the wealthy and try to mislead us about it.

HIS CHOICE

Here's Ryan's choice tonight: Romney vs. Romney vs. The Truth. Which will he choose to defend?

• Sure, there are politicians who spin and twist the truth -- then there's Romney and Ryan.
• Elections should be about competing based on your record and your vision for the future, not seeing who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing.
• But Romney keeps hiding his real agenda because he knows the values and ideas it's based on are deeply unpopular. So the real debate here is Romney vs. Romney  vs. The Truth.
• We need leaders with mainstream American values -- not politicians with extreme ideologies who then try to mislead us about them.

FLASHBACK: Voters "deserve an honest debate," and campaign strategies based on "defaming others" and "wild and reckless accusations...disgrace the office of the presidency." --Romney, 2012

TAXES

This is a choice between an America where everybody pays their fair share -- or where working families pay more just so the richest few pay less.

• Romney & Ryan's tax plan makes you pay more so the wealthy pay less. Ryan even has a tax plan that would let Romney pay less than 1% in income taxes.
• It's as if they think struggling families aren't struggling enough and our middle class isn't already bearing enough of the burden.
• Ryan's trying to hide their tax plan, but here's the plain truth: the numbers work only if they raise taxes on the middle class -- including half of America Romney insulted as irresponsible victims and falsely accused of not paying taxes. (For the simple math, check out the Appendix at the bottom.)
• What Romney and Ryan are promising is mathematically impossible. You can't cut Warren Buffett's tax rate by 20% and then think you can fill in the hole it by eliminating his mortgage deduction or capping his deductions.

FLASHBACK: "There are 47 percent...who pay no income tax" and these Americans "will never take personal responsibility" for their lives and see themselves as "victims." --Romney, 2012

FLASHBACK: The Cayman Islands (where Romney stashes his millions) is "the place you hide your money." --Ryan, 2010

JOBS

We're moving forward to put Americans back to work -- we can't afford to switch now to a plan to lay off Americans.

• We've got so much more to do on jobs, but with five million more people back to work, we're moving forward. More Americans are going back to work faster in this recovery under President Obama than they did under Bush -- even though the recession Obama inherited was far worse.
• But Romney wants us to switch to his "jobs plan" that would mean massive layoffs -- two million people laid off in the next two years alone. Ryan's own budget would lay off even more people.
• In fact, Ryan and the rest of the Republican Congress voted to kill 7 million jobs last year alone -- instead of passing President Obama's jobs bill to put 2 million people back to work.

• It's ridiculous for Ryan to claim that more special tax breaks for the wealthy will trickle down to us as more jobs. The real job creators are working people with money in their pockets -- customers who keep our businesses thriving and hiring.

FLASHBACK: "[Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? ...It's time for us to cut back on government..." --Romney, 2012

FLASHBACK: On President Obama's first day in office, Ryan met with other Republican leaders to plot how they could sabotage and undermine the economy in order to make the President fail.

MEDICARE

Here's the choice Romney & Ryan are actually offering: end Medicare as we know it.

• Ask yourself: who do you trust on Medicare? The party that created Medicare and fought for half a century to protect it -- or the politicians trying to privatize Medicare?
• After a lifetime of paying into Medicare with each paycheck, Americans expect Medicare to be there for them when they retire -- not the little vouchers and big new costs that Ryan is pushing.
• In fact, Obamacare preserves every dime of Medicare benefits, strengthens the trust fund, and guarantees your Medicare coverage for life.
• In contrast, Ryan wants to privatize Medicare -- sticking seniors with a little coupon and making them go fight with the big insurance companies to get coverage. By restructuring Medicare into a voucher system, he'd undermine and end "traditional Medicare," too.

FACT: Ryan likes to attack Obamacare for the same $700 billion savings in his own budget plan from cutting waste out of Medicare. Except now he'd put that waste back into Medicare just to score political points against the President, shortening the life of Medicare's trust fund.

FLASHBACK: "What I do is, I propose a lot of changes...converting Medicare into a defined contribution, sort of voucher system." --Ryan, 2009; "Other things that are in this Medicare bill that you need to look at are...we are basically privatizing the system." --Ryan, 2005

DEFICIT

The best way to deal with the deficit is to put Americans back to work -- not fire Big Bird.

• The best way to deal with the deficit is to put Americans back to work.
• Romney's plan? Fire Big Bird. Ryan's own budget plan actually adds $5 trillion to the deficit -- so no wonder the experts say it's "fraudulent," "grossly irresponsible," and "all smoke and mirrors."
• Taking responsibility would be admitting the tax giveaways you fought for caused the deficits we're dealing with today. But that's not what we expect from Republicans in Congress like Ryan.
• When your family needs money to repair the roof, you stop handing out gifts to your millionaire uncle instead of raiding your child's college savings.

FACT: Congressional Republicans, including Paul Ryan, pushed for the Bush policies behind today's deficits -- including the wasteful Bush tax cuts for the richest 2%.

POVERTY

This is a choice between "we're all in it together," with Americans lifting up and taking responsibility for one another and for themselves -- or "I've got mine, you're on your own."

• In America, we've always valued how hard a person works over what they have.
• Our government should reward hard work by increasing opportunities for families striving to make ends meet -- not cut them off from education and health care. But cutting them off and "I've got mine, you're on your own" are what Ryan's agenda does.
• No surprise -- Ryan follows the teachings of atheist philosopher Ayn Rand, who preached that only rich people had value, working people were parasites, and selfishness was the highest virtue.
• In fact, Catholic bishops, nuns, and evangelicals condemned Ryan's ideas for failing a "basic moral test." Catholic leaders even rebuked him for twisting church teaching to justify his ideas.

FLASHBACK: "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." --Ryan, 2005

FLASHBACK: "Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want the welfare state." --Ryan, 2011

BUDGET

This is a choice between an America that works for all of us -- or one that works for the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.

• In America, our leaders are supposed to work for all of us, not just the wealthiest few.
• But Romney and Ryan's plan for America would be the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the already-rich -- top-down class warfare.
• We already tried trickle-down and all we got to show for it are scarce jobs, massive deficits, and a shrinking middle class. Been there, done that. Why go back to failed Bush policies?
• Letting seniors go bankrupt and poor children go hungry to avoid asking your campaign donors to pay their fair share is cowardly. Courage is standing up to the oil companies, big corporations, and millionaires funding your campaigns and demanding they pay their fair share.

FLASHBACK: On whether Ryan's policies are his plans, Romney said "I'm very supportive of the Ryan budget plan" and "we're on the same page." --Romney, 2012

FLASHBACK: Ryan actually lobbied to get the same job-creating stimulus funding he now criticizes just to score political points against the President, and Romney admitted that massive spending cuts will cost jobs and "throw us into recession or depression."

ABORTION

This is a choice between leaders with mainstream American values -- or dishonest politicians with extreme ideologies.

• On issue after issue, Romney has been trying to hide his real agenda from the American people because he knows the ideas it represents are deeply unpopular. We need leaders with mainstream American values, not politicians with extreme ideologies.
• He's now trying to hide his extreme position on abortion -- an issue that people have deeply-held beliefs about and where we especially expect our leaders to be honest.
• Instead Romney's been claiming that rape victims should be forced to bear their rapist's child one moment, then saying they shouldn't have to and back again.
• Since Romney and Ryan say "our position's unified" on abortion, look to what Ryan would do: Redefine rape so that victims are forced to have their rapist's child and their husbands are forced to sit by.

FLASHBACK: Romney said he would be "delighted" to sign a bill to not allow any abortions "at all, period" -- which would necessarily ban abortion in cases of rape and incest. --Romney, 2007

FLASHBACK: Romney would "absolutely" support "a constitutional amendment that would have established definition of life beginning of life at conception." --Romney, 2011

APPENDIX

Here's the simple math on their tax plan that Ryan says would take him "too long to go through":                                     

Lower tax rates by 20% = $2.5 trillion
Eliminate AMT = $700 billion
Repeal high-income payroll tax = $300 billion
End estate tax = $150 billion
Tax cut for corporations = $1.1 trillion
TOTAL = $5 trillion with interest added in

End all tax benefits for the wealthy = $1.7 trillion
Eliminate corporate tax benefits to offset corporate tax cut = $1.1 trillion
Eliminate enough middle-class tax benefits to offset middle-class tax cut = $1 trillion
TOTAL = $4 trillion with interest added in

$5 trillion - $4 trillion = $1 trillion, which must be paid for by a tax hike on regular people or by adding to the deficit.

 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.