PRESS
RELEASE
from
Romney
for President
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
|
CONTACT: Romney Press Office
|
January 19, 2012
|
|
ROMNEY PENS OPEN LETTER
TO PRESIDENT OBAMA DURING HIS VISIT TO FLORIDA
Boston, MA – Today, Mitt Romney
wrote an open letter to President Obama during his visit to Florida.
The full letter will run in the Tampa Bay Times. The full text of the
letter is below:
Dear Mr. President,
Welcome to Florida. I have a simple question for you: where are the
jobs?
Unemployment
here was 8.5 percent when you assumed office. Today, as we enter the
fourth year of your term, it is 10 percent. Nearly a million men and
women here are fruitlessly seeking work. Many others have simply given
up looking. They’ve given up hope.
I
recognize, of course, as do all Americans, that you inherited an
economic crisis. But you’ve now had three years to turn things around.
The record of those three years is clear. Your policies have failed,
and not only in Florida, but across the nation. We have now had 35
consecutive months of unemployment over 8 percent, the longest such
stretch since the Great Depression. Your policies, from Obamacare to
your regulatory onslaught to your out-of-control spending on a
pork-barrel stimulus bill to your crony-capitalism “green” investments
in companies like the now-bankrupt Solyndra, have gotten in the way of
economic recovery.
The
results are a continuing tragedy for millions upon millions of people.
I’ve met too many Americans who’ve lost their homes to foreclosure,
who’ve had to put aside retirement plans and take work at minimum wage,
whose dreams of sending their children to college have been shattered,
whose lives have been upended. This is not the way it is supposed to be
in America. This is not the way it needs to be.
It
is plain that your policies have made things worse, not better. You
pressed hard for legislation that your team promised would hold
unemployment below 8 percent. The price tag on that legislation was
$787 billion, which vastly expanded our nation’s deficit and
contributed to an unprecedented downgrade of our nation’s credit
rating. And yet for all the taxpayer money that was spent and borrowed,
unemployment remains tragically high.
Mr.
President, forgive me for being blunt, but when it comes to economic
affairs, you’re out of your depth. Unlike you, I am not a career
politician. Unlike you, I’ve spent more than two decades working in the
private sector, starting new businesses and turning around failing
ones. Undoing the damage you’ve done will be a daunting challenge. But
I’ve learned a thing or two about how government policies can kill
private investment and stifle job creation and I have a plan to get
government out of the way and unleash the potential of the American
people.
Mr.
President, four years ago, campaigning for the presidency, you declared
that you were “absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be
able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when
we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless;
this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our
planet began to heal.” Mr. President, the American people are tired of
the grandiose promises. And they are even more tired of the paltry
results.
Mr.
President, your promises now ring hollow. If you have brought new ideas
to Florida for creating jobs, why have you waited three years to unveil
them? Have you suddenly had a revelation, or is it because 2012 is an
election year? Whatever the case, what you are offering Florida now is
too little, too late. What Florida needs, and what the country needs,
is not four more years of economic mismanagement and failed leadership,
but a fundamental change in direction.
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