Obama and Romney exchanged blows over taxes and jobs while on the campaign trail Tuesday. (DonkeyHotey/Flickr)

The president spoke to a crowd of 1,600 at an Iowa community college, emphasizing "tax fairness." Obama emphasized tax relief just one day after proposing the extension of Bush-era tax cuts for families making $250,000 annually.

From  Reuters:

"We should make sure the taxes on the 98 percent of Americans don't go up and then we should let the tax cuts expire for folks like me, for the top 2 percent of Americans," said Obama.

….

"To give me another tax break, or to give Warren Buffett another tax break or to give Mitt Romney another tax break, that would cost ... about a trillion dollars. And we can't afford it," he said.

Romney addressed Obama's comments while on the campaign trail in Colorado. He said Obama's brand of "old-style liberalism of bigger and bigger government and bigger and bigger taxes has got to end."

"They very idea of raising taxes on small businesses and job creators at the very time we need more jobs is the sort of thing only an extreme liberal can come up with," said Romney. 

Romney continued to call the president the "outsourcer-in-chief," using his campaign stop to highlight a Washington Post article that criticizes Obama's outsourcing record.

From the Associated Press:

"He's run some interesting attack ads on me on that topic," said Romney. "It is interesting that when it comes to outsourcing that this president has been outsourcing a good deal of American jobs himself, by putting money into energy companies that end up making their products outside the United States."

Iowa and Colorado are expected to be two highly contested states come the November election.

Read the full story at Reuters or the Associated Press.

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