The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein reports on what Mitt Romney told Sean Hannity in an interview today:
“The issue is not so much how we finance Social Security, it’s that Gov. Perry in his book ‘Fed Up,’ says that Social Security has been forced on us, and by no measure is Social Security anything but a failure,” Romney said. “That is being against not just how you finance Social Security, but being against Social Security. One, in my view, that is wrong. I am for Social Security. I want to save Social Security, it’s an essential safety net for the American people. And number two, it’s terrible politics. If we nominate someone who the Democrats can correctly characterize as being opposed to Social Security, we will be obliterated as a party.”
Meanwhile, the Perry campaign is accusing Romney of hypocrisy for the comments he made in support of Social Security last night:
Last night, Romney said, “Under no circumstances would I ever say, by any measure, it’s a failure. It is working for millions of Americans.”
However, in his book “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness”, which was published just last year, Romney compared those managing Social Security to criminals, saying: “Let’s look at what would happen if someone in the private sector did a similar thing. Suppose two grandparents created a trust fund, appointed a bank as trustee, and instructed the bank to invest the proceeds of the trust fund so as to provide for their grandchildren’s education. Suppose further that the bank used the proceeds for its own purposes, so that when the grandchildren turned eighteen, there was no money for them to go to college. What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money? They would go to jail. But what has happened to the people responsible for the looming bankruptcy of Social Security? They keep returning to Congress every two years.”
Romney also says in his book, “To put it in a nutshell, the American people have been effectively defrauded out of their Social Security.”