Romney rips Obama's tax proposal

Mitt Romney blasted President Obama's push to repeal the Bush-era tax rates on incomes over $250,000 per year, saying it "will kill jobs."

In an interview with WHKT-AM, a Virginia radio station, on Tuesday morning, the presumptive GOP nominee said the proposal would impose "a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business.”

He also called it "another kick in the gut to the middle class in America.”

Obama framed his argument for renewing tax rates for all but the wealthiest Americans as among the central issues of the campaign during a White House speech Monday, where the president was flanked by middle-class workers.

“In many ways, the fate of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans will be decided by the outcome of the next election,” Obama said. “My opponent will fight to keep them in place. I will fight to end them, but that argument shouldn’t threaten you.”

But Romney seemed to welcome that fight, arguing that Obama, “having never had a job in the private economy, just doesn’t understand the kind of difficulty it is to start a business, to grow a business, to decide to hire people, to bring them on board, to train them, to take the risk associated with expanding an enterprise.”

The former governor hopes to use the issue to pivot back to stagnant jobs numbers and the federal deficit, which his campaign believes he can use to score points with voters. On Tuesday, Romney also looked to frame the president's healthcare reform law in that context.

"The idea of a trillion dollars in new federal spending, when we’re already racking up trillion-dollar deficits every year, is an unacceptable idea,” Romney said. “We simply can’t go there. We can’t keep spending more and more money, borrowing more and more money from China and other places. We are putting America in peril. ObamaCare must be stopped.”

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