Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Tim Pawlenty wants to impose “misguided and wrongheaded policies”

Today, in his first major economic speech as a presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty laid out his vision for the country's economy. He proposes cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and slashing the tax rate for corporations from 35 percent to 15 percent—a move that would explode the national deficit and hurt America's seniors and working families most of all.

In response, Debbie Wasserman Schultz released the following statement:

Tim Pawlenty's plan to extend and expand the Bush tax cuts, deeply slashing taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans and corporate America and sending our deficit soaring even higher, is not an economic plan—it's a prescription for economic disaster that would fall squarely on the backs of seniors and working families. Mr. Pawlenty would take the Republican policies of the last decade, which exploded our deficit and debt and nearly sank our economy into a second Great Depression, and inject them with steroids.

Of course, perhaps no one should be surprised that Mr. Pawlenty, who left the state of Minnesota with a massive budget deficit, is now proposing to explode the deficit at the federal level. Tim Pawlenty left the people of Minnesota with a budget and economic nightmare. When Tim Pawlenty left the governor's office, middle-class families and small-business owners were paying higher property tax bills, college students were paying more for tuition, and at the same time funding for special education and services to seniors had been slashed. Even after raising taxes on hardworking Minnesotans and slashing vital services, Mr. Pawlenty left the state saddled with an historic $6.2 billion projected deficit.

On budget and fiscal matters Tim Pawlenty failed the people of Minnesota, and now he wants to impose such misguided and wrongheaded policies on the rest of us. No thank you.