Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday called Mitt Romney’s refusal to release the details of his tax plan until after the election “a red flag,” suggesting that Romney’s tax math doesn't add up.
Romney’s proposed tax cuts would add trillions to the national debt, Clinton argued on CBS’s This Morning, which the candidate has said he would balance by eliminating deductions in the tax code. But eliminating enough of those deductions to balance the budget would “wind up raising taxes on people in the middle income group,” Clinton said.
“He says he can [balance the budget] without raising taxes on the middle class. I’m not sure that’s possible,” Clinton said. “But he wants to defer until after the election saying what the specifics are. I think that ought to be a little bit of a red flag.”
The Romney campaign responded to the remarks with a jab at Obama's tax policies, alleging in an e-mail to National Journal that the only candidate who has raised taxes on the middle class is the president.
"Mitt Romney understands that the last thing we should do during a recession is to punish working families and small business owners with job killing tax hikes," wrote Romney spokesman Ryan Williams.
Clinton also commented on President Obama’s handling of the situation in the Middle East, saying that the suggestion that America “could or even should be in the driver’s seat in the Arab Spring is inherently ridiculous.”
Clinton’s remarks were in response to a question about comments by Dan Senor, one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers, on Friday, saying that Obama’s policy in the Middle East is making America look “impotent” in the region.
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