Obama camp calls Romney and Santorum budget busters
Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET
President Obama's re-election campaign is treating Rick Santorum like a serious contender, looking past his hardline social conservatism to critique his economic policies.
The Obama campaign on Tuesday released a memo that casts both Santorum and Mitt Romney as budget busters, in spite of their claims they would reduce national deficits.
"As Sen. Santorum has risen in the polls, the scrutiny of his policies will follow," Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, told reporters Tuesday. "And the fact is, [Romney and Santorum] have both introduced proposals that would lead to massive increases in the deficit. And so we thought it was appropriate" to look at what those proposals would do.
The memo claims that by rejecting any tax increases or new sources of revenue while calling for inordinate tax cuts, Santorum and Romney have put together unrealistic budgets that would come at a high cost to many Americans. The campaign contrasted their plans with Mr. Obama's proposed 2013 budget, which relies both on new taxes for the wealthiest Americans and budget cuts.
Romney's plan, the Obama campaign contends, would increase the deficit by at least $175 billion in the year 2016 alone, even if he enacted his deficit reduction proposals. The deficit increase would come from increased defense spending and proposed tax cuts for corporations and investors.
Santorum's plan aims to cut $5 trillion from from the federal budget over five years with few specific proposals for deficit reduction, the Obama campaign argues -- leading to even higher deficits than the Romney plan.
Santorum has "simply called for across the board spending cuts of various sorts," Harvard economist Jeffery Liebman told reporters. "But simple arithmetic shows how unrealistic his plan would be... Santorum would have to eliminate all defense spending and all domestic discretionary spending simply to match the president's level of deficit spending. Or I guess he could do it by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits significantly for existing retirees. So the Santorum's budget is definitely operating in fantasy land."
As Santorum has gained momentum, Romney has also taken aim at his GOP rival's economic policies. On the campaign trail in recent days, he's blasted Santorum for supporting congressional funding of pet projects and for voting to raise the nation's legal borrowing limit.
The Romney campaign responded to the Obama team's memo by charging that the president is in no position to criticize Romney's budget proposals.
"After all, this is the president who just proposed the largest tax increase in American history and has given us four straight trillion-dollar budget deficits," Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said. "Middle-income Americans have been crushed by the Obama economy and millions of American workers have just given up looking for work. This was the president who told us that if he didn't fix the economy in three years, he'd be looking at a one term proposition. It's time to collect."
