Romney Owes Newt

Think Progress: During an appearance on CNBC last night — the network of choice for those who favor tax cuts for the wealthy, bonuses for bailed out bankers and who think tax dodging is a way to fight “tyranny” — new GOP 2012 presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich said that it’s because of him that his chief rival, Mitt Romney, was able to amass a fortune of up to $250 million. “You could make an argument that I helped Mitt Romney get to be rich, because I helped pass the legislation” that former President Ronald Reagan wanted in the 1980s, Gingrich claimed. “He should be thanking me”:

I was part of [Sen. Jack] Kemp’s little cabal of supply siders who, I think largely by helping convince Reagan and then working with Reagan, profoundly changed the entire trajectory of the American economy in the 1980s. You could make an argument that I helped Mitt Romney get to be rich, because I helped pass the legislation…He should be thanking me! He should be thanking me because I did the macroeconomic things necessary to make his career possible.

Romney made his money, for the most part by ripping apart companies, not paying tax, and destroying and offshoring American jobs. And Newt did play a part in making it all possible, though it's not something either of them should be bringing up. But since he did, you want to vote for the guy that got rich by gutting our economy or the guy that pushed the laws that made it possible?