Dear Friend,

It’s important to know just what Mitt Romney is proposing for veterans. Frankly, it’s scary, and I thought you should know.

Behind all the rhetoric is one simple fact: Mitt Romney has said he supports cutting funding for veterans, and supports virtually every veteran paying a higher tax rate than he does. Mitt Romney can say all the right words, but the fact is, if he is President, he has already made clear that the promise to American veterans will be broken, and broken badly.

Indeed, behind Mitt Romney’s rhetoric are disturbing policies he supports:

• Romney supports the Paul Ryan Budget

  • The budget calls for across the board spending freezes and cuts. If enacted, the Ryan GOP budget would cut $11 billion from veterans spending, or 13 percent from what President Obama proposes in his own plan.

• Romney supports a tax cut for himself and the other 1 percent of richest Americans, when he already pays a lower tax rate than virtually all career military, and most veterans.

  • While we still don't know the tax rate Mitt Romney has paid over several years, because he refuses to release the returns, we do know he paid a 13.9 percent rate in 2010.  That means he pays a lower rate than most career military members, enlisted and officers.  Of course, because of off-shore accounts, on which he paid no tax, in some years he may have paid no taxes at all, meaning every single military member and veteran paid more in taxes than he did, in real dollars.

• Romney supports open-ended war in Afghanistan

  • In February, when the Administration began to outline a transition out from Afghanistan, Romney said, "The president's mistakes, some of them are calculated on a philosophy that's hard to understand and, sometimes, you scratch your head and say: How can he be so misguided and so naive? Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy. The secretary of defense said that on a day certain... we're going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan."
    
    
  • The US is spending about $2 billion a week in Afghanistan.  That is money that could be invested in home, including investment in projects that create jobs that veterans could fill.

 

• Romney "wondered" about privatizing the VA, and the VFW lashed out at the idea.

  • Though we know Romney would cut $11 billion in funding for the VA, we still don't know if he would privatize the VA, like he said he thought about, last year.  In South Carolina, during the primary, Romney said, "Sometimes you wonder, would there be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, each soldier gets X-thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them, like what happens with schools in Florida where they have a voucher that follows them. Who knows?"
    
    
  • In response, none other than the VFW, in front of which Romney is speaking on Tuesday, told Talking Points Memo, "The VFW doesn't support privatization of veterans health care. This is an issue that seems to come around every election cycle."

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