The Real Romney Record

Mitt Romney claims he knows how to solve the country's problems because of his experience in the private sector. During the Republican primary all of his opponents laughed at the absurdity of that assertion. You probably already watched the Newt Gingrich short film, When Mitt Romney Came To Town. Above is the video the Obama just released, Broken Promises: Romney's Massachusetts Record, is about how Romney's promises about his business expertise impacted the people of Massachusetts. The voters there were taken in enough to elect him to a single term as governor-- something they came to regret. In it you'll see state Rep. Carl Sciorino (D-Middlesex) explain how Romney "used debt to pay for annual operations costs. That's like paying your rent on your credit card-- and that was Mitt Romney's plan for the way we maintained our highways, the way we cleaned our streets. It was a really flawed way of addressing basic operations... to go deeper and deeper into debt... There are times when I watch Mitt Romney saying the exact same things now that he said here in Massachusetts in 2002, in a robotic way that's completely hollow. It didn't work here so I'm not quite sure why he thinks it might work nationally." Melrose Mayor Rob Doland agreed:

Governor Romney's plan for America right now is the same plan that he sold to the people of Massachusetts in 2002: "Less Government; less debt; better business; and less taxes." The result was the opposite: more fees, less business, more debt, bigger government here in Boston.

Romney left office with Massachusetts' economy in the toilet-- along with his own popularity. The voters were sick of him by 2006 and couldn't wait for him to go back to Utah or Michigan or La Jolla or Mexico or Paris or wherever he's from. By the end of his governorship only 34% of Massachusetts voters approved of him. Today, he concedes he has no chance to win in the only state that ever elected him to anything and saw him attempt to put is private business experience into government action. He won't even campaign in Massachusetts.

Thursday I listened to an NPR interview with former congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), who served in the House for 16 years on the Budget Committee and as the top ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee (and as the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He was one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation and national chairman of the American Conservative Union. He's not buying Romney's bullshit about how his career in vulture capitalism qualifies him for anything.

Former Republican Rep. Mickey Edwards says many successful CEOs are good at big-picture thinking-- understanding all the component parts of a problem. But Edwards also says that business and politics are very different endeavors, and that someone who succeeds in one won't necessarily do well in another.

"To run around saying we must run government like a business is really a silly idea," Edwards says. "It shows a total lack of understanding of the purposes of government."

...Politicians who run for office promising to create jobs misunderstand the nature of the position they're seeking, Edwards says.

"Presidents don't have that power," he says. "Presidents don't create jobs; presidents can maybe help if they can get Congress to go along with them. They might be able to help shape a policy that is more encouraging, more incentive-laden for job creation."

Edwards says Romney probably understands that because he also served as governor of Massachusetts, where he regularly had to work with Democrats. Romney may be running on his business record, but it's seasoned with something he's less inclined to emphasize-- his stint in politics.

UPDATE: Krugman On The Failure Of The Conservatives' Austerity Agenda

With Republican governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Georgia, Florida and Maine, to name a few, on a jihad against public workers-- reducing employment in the eye of the Bush economic downturn-- it's almost as if there was a concerted effort at economic sabotage against President Obama's efforts to rescue the economy. As the disappointing job growth numbers were released today, many people turned to Krugman for an explanation. And he did a great job, using the double dip in the U.K.-- which has implemented a Paul Ryan-type approach-- as the example.

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” So declared John Maynard Keynes 75 years ago, and he was right. Even if you have a long-run deficit problem-- and who doesn’t?-- slashing spending while the economy is deeply depressed is a self-defeating strategy, because it just deepens the depression.

So why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger?

Over the past few days, I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.

The bad metaphor-- which you’ve surely heard many times-- equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt-- which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt-- shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls-- my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.

This isn’t a new insight. The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.” Recent events, above all the austerity death spiral in Europe, have dramatically illustrated the truth of Fisher’s insight.

And there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered-- but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.

As I said, this isn’t a new insight. So why have so many politicians insisted on pursuing austerity in slump? And why won’t they change course even as experience confirms the lessons of theory and history?

Well, that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”

Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.

And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describing Ireland as “a shining example of the art of the possible.” Meanwhile, the Cato Institute was praising Iceland’s low taxes and hoping that other industrial nations “will learn from Iceland’s success.”

So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

In fairness to Britain’s conservatives, they aren’t quite as crude as their American counterparts. They don’t rail against the evils of deficits in one breath, then demand huge tax cuts for the wealthy in the next (although the Cameron government has, in fact, significantly cut the top tax rate). And, in general, they seem less determined than America’s right to aid the rich and punish the poor. Still, the direction of policy is the same-- and so is the fundamental insincerity of the calls for austerity.

The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.

600,000 public sector jobs have been cut since 2009... 600,000. Is that deliberate sabotage? Or a kind of Ayn Rand idealism that just amounts to sabotage? That 600,000 job loss in the name of failed Austerity, more than negates the 500,000 manufacturing jobs that have been created in the same time period.