The campaign for President Barack Obama offered Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney a deal on Friday. The offer was if Romney would release the last five years of his tax returns, the Obama campaign would stop demanding to see more. The Romney campaign politely refused the offer, saying the request was a ploy by the Obama campaign to distract voters away from the real issues.

The manager of Romney’s campaign, Matt Rhoades said it was clear that the Obama campaign just wants to talk about the tax returns of Governor Romney and not the issues that matter most to the country’s voters, such as lowering unemployment, correcting the problems in the economy and cutting back on government spending.

The offer from Obama’s campaign came just a day after Romney announced that over the past decade, he has paid at least a 13% tax rate each year. The Obama camp said that the other candidates had all released five years of tax returns, while Romney has only released one. They said if he releases the returns it will help to better understand the effective tax rates he paid, the foreign investments he has made and the foreign accounts he keeps.

The Romney campaign deflected the requests by stating that he would continue to lay out his ideas for creating a stronger middle class, to get people off welfare, to save Medicare and to help the nearly 23 million people in America without jobs.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, claimed that one source said to him that Romney had not paid any taxes for a number of years. To that, Romney replied that Reid’s charges were completely false and doubts that anyone actually said that to Reid.

When divulging the figure of 13%, Romney also said that the issue about taxes is just a smoke screen the Democrats are using to distract voters. He said that 23 million unemployed people, Iran becoming nuclear and one of six Americans suffering in poverty were more important than his taxes.