Top News of Clinton’s Tax Talk Echoes

Bill Clinton and I disagree on many things, but when it comes to stopping this massive tax hike on Jan. 1, we agree,” said Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “It’s my sincere hope that President Clinton’s call for action will spur this president to finally lead and prevent the larges tax increase in history, a tax increase that would devastate our already weak economy.

The former president attacked Mr Romney and contrasted his austere budget plans with Mr Obama's stimulus-orientated response to the 2008 financial crisis that saved jobs and the US car industry.

The former president’s comments in an interview this week that Congress “will probably have to put everything off until early next year” when it comes to the question of extending the Bush-era tax cuts are playing well in Republican quarters on Capitol Hill.

Mr Clinton said Mr Obama deserved a second term because of his record in stewarding the economy through a "miserable situation" and "the alternative would be, in my opinion, calamitous for our country and the world.

“Even Bill Clinton came out for it before he was against it,” House Speaker John Boehner said today, echoing the words that Republicans had for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts when he was running for president.

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, says extending the current tax rates for at least another year would help “provide some certainty to job creators.”

The intervention during a whistle-stop round of fund-raising events in New York came as both campaigns intensified their attacks on their respective candidates' records as job creators while in office.

Mr Clinton and Mr Obama were accompanied on Air Force One by the rock star Jon Bon Jovi who performed an acoustic version of his anthem "Living on a Prayer" for guests at the Waldorf Astoria. The three events raised an estimated $3.6m for the Obama campaign.

Mr Clinton's attack appeared to atone for his remark last week that Mr Romney had a "sterling" business record, a verdict that was unhelpful to the Obama campaign which has tried to paint the former boss of Bain Capital management consultants as a rapacious "vulture" capitalist.

Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under Clinton and as a White House economic adviser to Obama, said today in an appearance on MSNBC: We’ve got make sure that we don’t take the gasoline out of the tank at the end of this year… That’s got to be the top priority. We’ve got to make sure that we keep providing energy to the economy.

Bill Clinton has charged that electing Mitt Romney to the White House this November would be "calamitous" for America and the world, warning that Republican plans for steep spending cuts would stifle the US economic recovery.