One week after the release of secretly taped videos of Mitt Romney from a private fundraiser sent his poll numbers into a tailspin, the Obama campaign is using the controversial comments in a new television commercial that began running Monday.

In the 30 second ad, the narrator gets straight to the point, saying “Mitt Romney attacked 47% of Americans who pay no income tax, including veterans, the elderly and disabled."

The narrator refers to the secret video clips released last Monday in Mother Jones of Romney at a private fundraiser in Florida in May. The material, recorded without the candidate’s knowledge, showed the Republican challenger telling the audience that 47% of voters are dependent on the government, see themselves as victims, and would “vote for the president no matter what.”

One of the clips is incorporated in the new spot. “My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney says while standing at the podium.

The narrator then asks viewers “Doesn’t the President have to worry about everyone?”

“Mitt Romney paid just 14.1 percent in taxes last year,” says the narrator, claiming that “he keeps millions in Bermuda and the Cayman islands.”

The spot ends with the narrator saying "Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes, Romney should come clean on his."

Just don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen!

David Koch is hosting a fundraiser for millionaire Mitt Romney at his Hamptons estate Sunday evening. You could have come over to Koch's house today to meet Mitt Romney, assuming you had a spare $50,000 lying around. How do the elite afford those $50,000 tickets? Tax rates for the super-elite, the top .01%, have fallen in half since Mitt Romney’s father ran for president; or to put it differently, after tax income for this group has doubled due to policy alone. And bear in mind that the US economy flourished just fine under those 60-70 tax rates.

Not only have taxes on people such as Mitt Romney plummeted since 1960, they've risen flor nearly every income group except for the poor and very poor. The Bush tax cuts were especially generous to the uberwealthy, which isn't really a surprise.

Hopefully we'll hear these statistics from an annual IRS report cited frequently during the 2012 campaign season. These shocking numbers emphasize the vast divide of income disparity between the 1 percent and the 99% of Americans:

In addition to the six who paid no tax, another 110 families paid 15 percent or less in federal income taxes. That’s the same federal tax rate as a single worker who made $61,500 in 2009.

Overall, the top 400 paid an average income tax rate of 19.9 percent, the same rate paid by a single worker who made $110,000 in 2009. The top 400 earned five times that much every day.
...

Let’s return for a moment to the single worker who made $61,500 in 2009 and paid 15 percent of his salary in federal income taxes. The top 400 made more every three hours than he did in a year, and yet many of them paid the same or a lower tax rate, according to the data in the report.

Why would anyone vote for a candidate who would continue to favor only a very small portion of Americans? Surely there are Republicans out there who fall into this income bracket, and they can't all be sadomasochists... can they?

[Via The National Memo]