LAS VEGAS -- Mitt Romney said Friday that he has paid taxes "every year," vigorously disputing an assertion by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee paid no income taxes for a decade.

“Harry Reid really has to put up or shut up,” Romney told reporters following a rally here.

“Let me also say, categorically, I have paid taxes every year. And a lot of taxes. So Harry is simply wrong and that is why I am so anxious for him to give us the names of the people who put this forward. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear the names are people from the White House or the Obama campaign or who knows where they are coming from,” Romney added.

Romney's heated words toward the Senate's top Democrat follows Reid's repeated assertion this week that an investor in Romney's former firm, Bain Capital, confided that Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. Reid hasn't substantiated the claim, nor has he identified his source, but that hasn't stopped the claim from advancing.

Reid wouldn't back down on Friday, either, issuing a statement calling for the release of more of the presumptive GOP nominee’s tax returns.

Rick Wilking / REUTERS

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney makes a point at a campaign event in Golden, Colorado August 2, 2012.

"Romney's message to Nevadans is this: he won't release his taxes, but he wants to raise yours,” Reid’s statement said. "It's hard to say which is more insulting to Americans' intelligence, Mitt Romney's tax plan or his refusal to show the American people what's in his tax returns.”

But asked why Romney won’t just release more of his tax returns to silence the attacks, the former Massachusetts governor said he is just following suit.

“I’m following the precedent set by the last presidential candidate of our party, John McCain, putting out two years of income tax returns and putting out a financial disclosure statement, those as required by law, of course,” Romney said.

Speaking to reporters during his first stateside press conference since last month's jobs report, Romney said these attacks by the Senate majority leader – in addition to those by President Barack Obama – are not what the country should be focusing on right now.

“I had hoped it would be a debate on the direction of the country but what we are seeing instead is one attack after the other that are misleading, false attacks,” he said. “The president’s ads saying I am going to raise taxes on the middle class. That’s patently, simply false. The president has now raised taxes on the middle class as so determined by the Supreme Court.”

There are still too many Americans looking for work, President Barack Obama said Friday in reaction to July's jobs numbers, renewing his demand that Congress extend expiring tax cuts for most U.S. households.

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, speaking at the same time in the swing state of Nevada, highlighted a report showing the economy added 163,000 jobs in July as an indictment of the president's economic policies.

"These numbers are not just statistics," Romney said. "These are real people, really suffering, having hard times."

The monthly report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has assumed a heightened level of political significance for an election in which the economy and jobs is the top issue. While job creation in July matched private forecasters' estimates, the unemployment rate ticked upward to 8.3 percent.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Barack Obama talks about taxes, Friday, Aug. 3, 2012, in the Old Executive Office building of the White House complex.

Obama hailed the positive jobs figures in the report and argued his administration had presided over the creation of 4.5 million jobs since January of 2009.

"But let's acknowledge: we've still got too many folks out there who are looking for work," he said at the White House. "We've got more work to do on their behalf."

The president used the occasion to push again for lawmakers to renew the so-called "Bush tax cuts" for households with incomes under $250,000 per year, and individual income under $200,000. The Democratic-held Senate passed a bill to that effect last week, but House Republicans defeated it in a vote on Wednesday.

Without referencing Romney specifically, Obama pointed to a report issued by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which argued a plan like the presumptive GOP nominee's would effectively raise taxes on the middle class since a number of deductions favored by middle class households could be eliminated. (The Romney campaign called this report a "joke.")

"The people standing behind me should not have to pay more so the wealthiest can pay less," Obama said in reference to a group standing behind him during his remarks. "That's not top-down economics, that's upside-down economics."

The dueling presidential candidates' rhetoric served as a case study, though, of the alternative interpretations of July's new employment figures.

Romney, in a statement earlier in the morning and in his Las Vegas-area remarks, called the jobs report "another hammer blow" for the middle class.

The former Bain Capital executive stressed his private sector experience as a chief qualifier, and went so far as to promise the creation of 12 million jobs during his first term should he be elected.

The setting in Nevada, which has been among the hardest-hit states in the recession and where the housing market has struggled to recover, was no accident for Romney. Nevada is set to be one of the handful of states that could determine the Electoral College winner in November.

Romney's speech also allowed him to relitigate Obama's "you didn't build that" gaffe from last month, in which the president seemed to suggest that business owners owed some of their success to the government.

"The president has said we’re taking him out of context, but then you go look at the rest of his speech -- it’s on YouTube -- the context is worse than the quote," Romney said, earning him some of the loudest applause from the crowd.

Voters and reporters looking to Mitt Romney for new jobs proposals or additional details about his existing plans shouldn't expect many, the presumptive Republican nominee's aides said Thursday.

Most of Romney's fall campaign will involve "re-introducing a lot of the policy that came out a year ago," Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said on a conference call with reporters. The reason for that, he explained, was to remind them "of the governor's very detailed policy" now that voters are playing closer attention to the campaign.

The conference call was organized to outline the jobs policies about which Romney will speak today in Colorado. But the five priorities mentioned on the conference call -- energy, trade, education, cutting the deficit, and freeing up businesses from regulation -- have generally been staples of the former Massachusetts governor's campaign for much of the past year.

Kacper Pempel / REUTERS

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivers foreign policy remarks at the University of Warsaw Library in Warsaw July 31, 2012.

The question of specifics, though, has been one that has plagued the Romney campaign -- and it's not only Democrats who have voiced this criticism.

"The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it's Mr. Obama's fault," the Wall Street Journal's right-leaning editorial board wrote in early July. "Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President's policies aren't working and how Mr. Romney's policies will do better."

But the Romney campaign has generally brushed off these complaints as imprudent politics. Boston has clearly broadcast that they are satisfied with the plans they have offered. ("He doesn’t need to lay out new policies," Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a surrogate of Romney's and potential running mate, told National Review Online earlier this week.)

The Romney campaign has been generally opaque in its approach to several issues that could conceivably expose their candidate to scrutiny, which could distract from their central narrative about Obama and the economy. For instance, the campaign's refusal to detail which tax deductions Romney would favor eliminating – to show how he’d prefer to balance the budget – mirrors his refusal to release more than two years of tax returns, to detail his exit from Bain Capital, or to lay out how his administration would be more transparent than Obama’s.

On each question, though, the Romney campaign has left open a void of detail, and the Obama campaign and Democrats have gladly stepped in to fill it.

The president himself trumpeted a report from the nonpartisan, independent Tax Policy Center about Romney's tax plan.
The study concluded that, based on the available details about Romney's plan, that it would threaten a higher tax burden on the middle class, because it disproportionately takes advantage of exemptions that would be eliminated to finance tax reform.

But the enduring story of the Romney campaign is its conclusion early in the campaign that little else will matter on election day aside from voters' conclusion about Obama's handling of the economy. They've bet that the broad contours of Romney's policy contours will be enough to sway voters, and that they can weather criticism about the specifics without any of that becoming fatal.

"That report you referenced is a joke," Fehrnstrom said of the center’s report on the call. "There are serious problems with the authorship of that study, and the methodology."

One of the authors was an economic adviser member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. But the other was the senior staff economist on President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

"The governor's plan essentially lays out the parameters that he wants to achieve," Jonathan Burks, the Romney campaign's deputy policy director, said on the call. "And within that, he would write a tax bill that achieves those goals. And so it's not a question of today, you know, we've got a 2,000-page tax plan that could be scored and demonstrated ... The details of how that would be accomplished would have to be worked out with Congress."

Republicans are quick to note that President Obama has offered few detailed proposals for his second term, and argue that the "American Jobs Act" first introduced by the White House last fall is only a re-hash of old policies.

But the Romney campaign's bet that it doesn't need to offer more detail opens the door to the Obama campaign and Democrats' efforts to turn the election into a choice between the president and Romney, even if it involves mischaracterizing elements of Romney's background – or inserting policy details that don’t exist -- that the GOP candidate won't define for himself.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made an especially specious claim in that vein when he told the Huffington Post this week that a Bain investor -- who he did not name -- told him that Romney had paid no effective tax rate for a decade.

Fehrnstrom angrily condemned that suggestion during an appearance Thursday on Fox News, but there are no indications that the evidence Romney could offer to rebuff those charges will be publicly available anytime soon.

NBC's Jay Rankin and Garrett Haake contributed.

The House on Wednesday evening rejected a proposal to allow tax cuts on the wealthy to expire, instead passing an alternative bill to preserve existing tax rates for a year, an act of political theater setting up a contentious post-election fight.

The Republican-controlled House voted 256 to 171 to preserve current tax rates, which were first enacted by President George W. Bush in 2001 and later extended in 2010 for another two years with President Barack Obama's support.

In a separate vote, the House shot down, 170 to 257, a Democratic bill to extend current tax rates past the end of this year only for households earning less than $250,000 per year and individuals earning less than $200,000 per year. This plan has the current backing of the president, and was approved last week by the Senate. Nineteen Democrats joined a unanimous GOP conference on the vote.

The vote virtually ensures that the fate of the expiring tax cuts won't be decided until after the election. Though House GOP leaders wrote Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday to say they "stand ready to bring the House back into session for the purpose of enacting solutions" as it relates to taxes or the automatic defense cuts set for Jan. 1, leaders in both parties have conceded that a truce unlikely.

The House is set to break for recess after Thursday's votes, leaving few legislative days left on the calendar before the election.

Rather, leaders in both parties have generally acknowledged that the fate of the tax cuts are likely to be determined as an outgrowth of the election. That factor has only heightened the political positioning of these votes, which were orchestrated more as a messaging instrument than as a legislative solution.

To that end, the result in the House was the reverse of what happened last week in the Senate, which approved a version of the Democratic bill and rejected the Republican alternative to extend all the expiring tax cuts for a year and require Congress to work on tax reform in the meanwhile.

Senate Republicans dropped procedural objections to the Democratic bill -- which would extend current tax rates past the end of this year only for households earning less than $250,000 per year and individuals earning less than $200,00 per year -- as a way of putting rival lawmakers on record in support of a tax hike heading into an election season.

The Senate voted 51-48 in favor of that proposal, though two retiring senators -- Virginia's Jim Webb, a Democrat, and Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats -- sided with Republicans.

President Obama spent much of the day on the campaign trail railing against his Republican opponent's tax plan.

"He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut," the president said of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's tax plan during a stop today in Ohio. "In order to afford just one $250,000 tax cut for somebody like Mr. Romney, 125 families like yours would have to pay another $2,000 in taxes each and every year."

Romney has said he supports extending the Bush tax cuts, so as to enable broader tax reforms in the next Congress.

"Keep the taxes in place that we have," he told CNBC's Larry Kudlow last month. "And then I would like to reform our tax code by bringing the rates down across the board for everybody."

Mitt Romney is betting on having already survived the worst personal scrutiny the Obama campaign has had to offer, leaving him with enough leftover political clout to wage an offensive this fall that would manage to unseat the president.

With 98 days until the election, the Romney campaign believes the dog days of summer are essentially behind them. The campaign views controversies involving his tax returns and work at Bain Capital as having a short shelf life, and the presumptive Republican nominee’s work to capitalize on the president’s “you didn’t build that” gaffe have effectively changed the subject. Romney’s foreign trip had also been built up as an opportunity to pivot away from July’s struggles, though momentum from the trip was more mixed due to stumbles on each of its three legs.

“Our whole goal was to just hold our own over the summer,” said Bay Buchanan, an outside adviser to the Romney campaign. “We've done the warm-up, and we're coming into the convention with a much better position than anticipated.”

But Democrats assert that the Republican shouldn’t be so quick to assume that the attacks based on Romney’s career and personal wealth will disappear.

Recommended: First Thoughts: Judging Romney's overseas trip

The first few weeks of July saw an unrelenting and coordinated offensive against Romney, led by the Obama campaign and a variety of Democratic groups. The former Massachusetts governor weathered weeks of ads accusing his private equity firm of having moved jobs overseas during Romney’s time in charge. To make matters worse, Romney had been somewhat opaque about the exact time of his departure from Bain Capital, and had also refused to release additional years of tax returns – leaving him vulnerable to speculation about what those hidden records contained.

The Romney campaign’s steadfastness in the face of scrutiny prompted semi-public handwringing among GOP poobahs, who wondered whether the GOP candidate was essentially allowing the president to define him.

Obama’s comments at a campaign stop in Roanoke, in which he seemed to suggest that business owners don’t deserve all the credit for their successes, handed the Romney campaign a chance to reverse momentum. Republicans have been hitting it hard since then, and the president even released an ad personally responding to the attack.

“You don't always want your candidate out there responding to everything they're saying,” said Buchanan. “We want him, Barack Obama, responding to us.”

Combined with anemic jobs numbers at the beginning of the month and a somewhat lackluster GDP report last week, Republicans believe their narrative on the economy is hardening and Romney remains strong enough to subsume Obama this fall.

This all sets the stage for a pivotal month of August, in which Romney must introduce himself to voters and begin turning the tide against Obama.

It just might be the case that July’s squabbles, though, will set the parameters for the fall debate.

“It’s wishful thinking on the part of the Romney to think it's behind them. They might survive it, but it's not behind them,” said former Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, a Democrat known for his strategic acumen.

Frost said that if he were Romney, he wouldn’t release additional tax returns beyond what’s already been pledged – for fear that there were years in which the former Bain leader paid little to no taxes.

“The Romney people are whistling in the dark if they think the Bain thing will go away,” Frost added.

Related: Romney says he wasn't talking about Palestinian culture

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was starker.

“This is going to be the issue that brings him down,” he said, arguing that the attacks on Bain and Romney’s taxes cut to the core of questions about Romney’s character and trustworthiness.

Dean argued that even Romney’s best message on the economy won’t sink in with voters unless they’re willing to put faith in the former Massachusetts governor as Obama’s alternative.

“He could have turned this into something really good. But as long as he’s got his tax returns hidden, it’s going to be fatal,” Dean said, referencing in particular the Republican assault on Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comments. “What Romney is doing is negating his advantage on the economy by not seeming trustworthy.”

But Romney’s team is almost zenlike in its singular focus on the economy. Though much of the past week was dominated by the Republican’s foreign policy tour – for both its embarrassing moments and triumphs – attention will soon turn back to the economy. This Friday’s report on job creation during July could give Romney a cudgel to use against Obama, and the impending selection of a Republican vice presidential candidate and next month’s Republican convention would allow the GOP to drive the campaign narrative into September.

“Once we turn that corner where we can get past the explanations about Bain – and I think we have – then it's a winning campaign,” said Buchanan, who said that the drumbeat for Romney to offer more specific policy alternatives to Obama were “secondary” to convincing voters that his vision on the economy is superior to Obama’s.

“We're going to hit the economy, stay on message the full extent we can. But we're not running in a vacuum. The other guy's going to be going after us personally,” she said. “You get your surrogates to respond to the personal stuff. They've hit us pretty hard, I don't know where else they're going to come.”

That might be music to the ears of the president’s team and most Democrats if their strategy on making the election into a choice – and disqualifying Romney in the process – is to be believed.

“I’ll say one thing about Obama, whatever my differences with him. He’s run the best campaign I’ve ever seen a Democrat run in my lifetime,” Dean said.

“Romney’s tried to keep this thing on the economy since March and he hasn’t succeeded. What makes you think he’s going to succeed the next three months?” he added.

House Republicans will allow a vote next week on the Democrats' bill to extend the expiring Bush tax cuts for households earning less than $250,000, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced Thursday.

Boehner said that Republicans were "more than happy" to bring to a vote the Democratic bill, which passed through the Senate on Wednesday in a narrow 51-48 vote.

The Democratic legislation extends the tax rates established by the President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 (referred to by many as the  “Bush tax cuts”) for only those households making $250,000 or less; tax rates for the highest income group would be allowed to spring back to their rate at the beginning of 2001.

Republicans will couple a vote on their own tax bill, which would extend the rates across the board for another calendar year, with the Democratic bill. These tax cuts were first set to expire at the end of 2009, but President Obama agreed with Republicans on legislation to extend the rates for another two years.

"If our Democrat colleagues want to offer the president's plan or the Senate Democrats' plan, we're more than happy to give them a vote," Boehner said.

Republicans are eager to allow a vote because the Democratic legislation is expected to fail in the GOP-led House. The Republican bill will likely pass, though neither bill will likely advance to the president's desk. Rather, both votes are largely for show and intended to put the other side's lawmakers on the record on taxes.

The battle over extending current tax rates equals nothing more than a common messaging war that both sides are happy to fight leading up to November's elections. Republicans want to be able to paint Democrats as trying to raise taxes on small business owners, while Democrats argue that Republicans want to give tax breaks to the richest Americans.

“The only thing standing in the way of a middle income tax cut is the House Republicans,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters today, “The Republicans want to spend hundreds of billions on an extra tax cut for people making over $250,000 a year.”

Obama echoed that call today, telling reporters that “the only thing that is going to prevent the vast majority of Americans from not seeing a tax increase next year is if the House doesn't act.”  Obama said that he and his cabinet members will continue to make that point in the coming days.

Both sides have conceded privately that this is a fight that will likely go down to the wire, when the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire on January 1, 2013. In the weeks before that deadline, Congress will need to address a number of issues that, taken together, have been deemed the “fiscal cliff” because of the potentially devastating consequences they could have on the economy if Congress does not act. 

In addition to addressing the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, Congress needs to reallocate automatic cuts scheduled to take effect as a result of the deficit Supercommittee’s failure last year. Because of their failure, automatic cuts to defense and non-defense agencies could result in an estimated 2 million jobs lost in 2013, a potentially massive blow to an already struggling economy.

In a speech at the Brookings Institution last week, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) threatened to use the extension of the tax rates as a bargaining chip going into year-end negotiations, which will also include the expiration of the payroll tax cut, as well as a fight over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling.

Murray says she could see a scenario in which Democrats allow all the tax cuts to expire, in an effort to put Republicans' feet to the fire so that they raise revenue to address the nation’s deficit. 

“If middle-class families start seeing more money coming out of their paychecks next year — are Republicans really going to stand up and fight for new tax cuts for the rich?,” Murray said in the speech, “Are they going to continue opposing the Democrats’ middle-class tax cut once the slate has been wiped clean?”

Updated 2:41 p.m. - Most Americans say Mitt Romney should release more of his tax returns, according to a new poll released Thursday.

Fifty-four percent of Americans said in a USA Today/Gallup poll that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee should release additional years of tax records beyond the 2010 returns he's already released and the 2011 filing Romney has pledged to make public before the election. Thirty-seven percent of adults said Romney should not have to release more tax records.

The Obama campaign has sought to make Romney's taxes an issue in the campaign, going so far as to suggest that, in the absence of evidence, it's possible that the former Bain Capital executive might not have had to pay any taxes in a given year.

Evan Vucci / AP

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gestures during a campaign stop on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 in Bowling Green, Ohio. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The Romney campaign has rejected that charge, and has refused to budge in its stance against releasing more tax returns. Doing that, Romney has said, would provide Democrats with more opposition research fodder.

"We've given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and about how we live our life. And so, the election, again, will not be decided on that," Ann Romney said of the tax returns on "Good Morning America."

Still, Republicans and conservative media outlets, fearing the collateral damage from the candidate's refusal, have joined the chorus calling for Romney to release his returns.

To that end, 30 percent of Republicans in the USA Today/Gallup survey said Romney should release his returns; 53 percent of independents want to see more of Romney's records.

The poll was conducted July 18 and has a 5 percent margin of error.

Trying to change the subject from talking about Romney’s business record or whether he should release more years of tax returns, the campaign this morning released a new ad this morning asking where all the stimulus money went and charges cronyism. The campaign didn’t say where the ad will be running. The script: “Where Did All The Obama Stimulus Money Go? “Friends, Donors, Campaign Supporters, Special Interest Groups. Where did the Obama stimulus money go? Solyndra. 500 million taxpayer dollars. Bankrupt. So where did the Obama stimulus money go? Windmills from China. Electric cars from Finland. Democrat Senator Charles Schumer: ‘79 percent of the 2.1 Billion in stimulus grants awarded through it went to overseas companies.’”

FactCheck.org wrote in 2010: “[T]he nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has ‘[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "[i]ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.’ Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.”

It also sent out an email highlighting all the stories written yesterday about Romney hitting Obama as being anti-business.

But, of course, Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu stepped all over the message. Here’s First Read’s report.

AP: “The Republican presidential candidate is trying to move past questions about his own business career and personal finances.”

NBCNews.com’s Tom Curry: “Although the presidential campaign rhetoric in recent days has been dominated by “sending jobs overseas,” more than 5 million Americans do live and work overseas and some of them vote and contribute to candidates. Highlighting their importance, Mitt Romney will be appearing at fundraising events when he visits London and Jerusalem at the end of July.”

The Romney campaign is also out with an ad featuring Romney son Craig speaking Spanish. He says, notes that the U.S. is a immigrants and that his grandfather, George, was born in Mexico.

The drumbeat for Mitt Romney to release additional years of tax returns is growing louder -- not just from President Obama's campaign, but also from conservatives who seem to worry about the political toll of the presumptive GOP nominee's refusal to do so.

The Associated Press reported that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called on Romney on Tuesday to release more of his tax returns beyond the 2010 forms he has already made public, and the 2011 returns Romney has pledged to release.

Perry had been among the conservatives to attack Romney over his personal finances and record at Bain Capital during the Republican presidential primary earlier this year. Another of Romney's former primary opponents, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, also told Politico on Tuesday that Romney should release additional returns.

The former Massachusetts governor has resisted releasing additional years of tax data, arguing that it would provide the Obama campaign with fodder to mine for political attacks.

"In the political environment that exists today, the opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy. And I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about," Romneytold National Review Online in an interview today.

But the editors of the conservative magazine joined the chorus demanding Romney release more returns.

"Romney argues that whatever he releases will not be enough to satisfy the Obama campaign and its factota in the media, who are, once again, proving their bias and double standards. Romney is right, but he should release the returns anyway. Let them go fish," the magazine said in an unsigned editorial.

Romney has given no indication that he would reverse his decision and provide additional tax data. In the meanwhile, the Obama campaign released a new television ad on Tuesday speculating that there might have been a year in which Romney paid no taxes at all.