A scene from the Obama campaign's new ad. (Photo: YouTube)

The Obama campaign continued their attack on Mitt Romney's offshore assets and refusal to release more of his tax returns with a new ad this morning entitled "Makes You Wonder." In the ad, a narrator points to the Vanity Fair investigation of Mr. Romney's finances and suggests his use of "tax havens,” "offshore accounts" and "carried interest" and his low overall tax rate indicate he may not have "paid any taxes at all" outside of the one year for which he did release returns, 2010.

"Mitt Romney has used every trick in the book. Romney admits that over the last two years he’s paid less than 15% in taxes on $43 million in income. Makes you wonder if some years he paid any taxes at all," the narrator says as text flashes across the screen showing the years 2005 through 2009 followed by question marks.

As a news clip of Mr. Romney saying he won't release more information than his 2010 return and his estimated liability for last year plays, the narrator suggests the mystery of Mr. Romney's monies can't be solved unless he discloses his returns.

"We don’t know because Romney has released just one full year of his tax returns and won’t release anything before 2010," the narrator says. "What is Mitt Romney hiding?"

The Romney campaign released an attack of their own this morning, a statement blaming the layoffs that occurred after the energy company Solyndra went bankrupt on "political payoffs" from the Obama administration. The statement included a fact sheet showing ties between Solyndra, which received a $535 million federal loan guarantee from the Department of Energy prior to going under, and Obama campaign donors.

“Life in the Obama economy is difficult for millions of struggling middle-class Americans–-but President Obama didn’t make it any easier for more than a thousand workers at Solyndra. While the President’s political allies reaped the benefits of half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, American workers lost everything. Middle-class families deserve better from their president,” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in the Solyndra statement.

Neither of these attacks are entirely new. The Obama campaign has spent weeks hitting Mr. Romney on his finances and Team Romney has done a prior Solyndra blitz. For now, these two campaigns seem intent on relentlessly digging into each other's personal histories rather than engaging in policy discussion. Perhaps that will change as the election approaches and the candidates meet for the presidential debates.

Watch the Obama campaign's new ad below.

A shot from the Romney campaign's video on the loan guarantee program. (Photo: YouTube)

Mitt Romney's newest web video accuses President Barack Obama and the Department of Energy of using a stimulus program to spur green jobs to pay off their friends by giving money to failing business ventures run by Democratic donors. The commercial highlights three energy companies that received loan guarantees through a DOE program and later lost money or went bankrupt; Solyndra, ECOTality, SunPower and First Solar. The ad alleges these companies received the cash because of their ties to the Obama ddministration and the Democratic Party.

"You’ve heard of Solyndra. They took $535 million in taxpayer loan guarantees and went bankrupt. But that’s not even half the story," the video's narrator says as an ominous piano sountrack plays. "More than 16 billion dollars have gone to companies like Solyndra that are linked to big Obama and Democrat donors. ... Obama is giving taxpayer money to big donors and then watching them lose it."

The U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee program that granted over $14.5 billion in guarantees to solar equipment maufacturers and projects came under fire from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after the failure of Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving a  $535 million federal loan guarantee. Solyndra's bankruptcy led the committee, which is chaired by Republican California Congressman Darrell Issa, to investigate the loan guarantee program. Mr. Issa subsequently released a report in March claiming the program gave too much money to risky businesses.

"These reports document a Department of Energy seemingly unprepared to deal with the exponential increase in taxpayer funds it received under the stimulus, leading to serious questions of waste and abuse," Mr. Issa said. "Taxpayers are right to expect better from the Department of Energy and the Obama Administration and to seek protections that this type of approach can be avoided in the future."

Following Mr. Issa's report, the Department of Energy defended the loan guarantees by arguing critics were singling out failures in an otherwise successful program in order to create "false and misleading controversy."

"For nearly a year, Congressional critics of the Department’s loan programs have demonstrated a consistent pattern of cherry-picking individual emails from the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents the Department has provided to Congress with the sole purpose of inventing false and misleading controversy," DOE spokesman Damien LaVera said in response to Mr. Issa's report. "As these investigations have made clear, decisions made on loan applications were made on the merits after extensive review by the experts in the loan program. ... We worked up until the last days doing all the due diligence."

Watch Mr. Romney's video attacking the loan guarantee program below.