Mitt Romney (Splash News)
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He’s rich. His taxes are low. And it’s fair.
Mitt Romney yesterday defended his plan to cut taxes — including the “low” rate he paid on his own investment income — as the best way to create jobs.
“It is a low rate,” he conceded during an interview with “60 Minutes,” when asked whether it’s fair that he was taxed 14 percent on the $20 million he earned from his personal portfolio when people earning a $50,000 salary pay higher rates.
Interviewer Scott Pelley asked Romney, who is tied or slightly behind President Obama in most polls, whether his lower tax rate was “fair.”
“Yeah. I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work,” he replied, noting that corporations pay taxes before their shareholders profit from dividends or higher stock prices.
Both Romney and Obama were interviewed separately by “60 Minutes” — but often asked the same questions.
In his interview, Romney dismissed claims he had flip-flopped on issues, such as the health-insurance law he championed as governor of Massachusetts.
“Have I found that some things I thought would be effective turned out to be not effective? Absolutely. If you don’t learn from experience, you don’t learn from your mistakes, why, you ought to be fired,” he said.
He repeated his vow to repeal ObamaCare if elected and disputed that uninsured Americans would be left without health care.
“If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die,” he said.
“We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to the hospital and give them care.”
Romney addressed comments he made during a closed-door fund-raiser, in which he said he doesn’t worry about the 47 percent of the country that doesn’t pay income tax. The remarks were caught by a hidden camera and exposed last week.
“Not everything I say is elegant. And I want to make it very clear, I want to help 100 percent of the American people,” he said.
Both Romney and Obama also discussed their thoughts and private moments.
Before hitting the sack, Romney said, he prays “to concentrate one’s thoughts, to meditate and to imagine what might be.”
Romney, a devout Mormon, quipped that his prayers are “between me and God,” but said he asks for “mostly wisdom and understanding.”
Obama faced similar questions from Steve Kroft.
His big idea was fixing the economy.
“I think there’s no bigger purpose right now than making sure that if people work hard in this country, they can get ahead. That’s the central American idea,” Obama said. “That’s how we sent a man to the moon.”
He said his vision of America is one of fairness.
“Everybody’s got a shot. Everybody’s treated with respect and dignity in which the divides of race and faith, gender, sexual orientation, those are not the determining factors in terms of whether people succeed, but instead it’s how hard you work,” he said.
Obama also explained how his 2008 campaign of “hope and change” has disappointed.
“I haven’t fully accomplished that. Haven’t even come close in some cases,” he said.