***
Snow Job on Jobs
by Paul
Krugman
OCT. 18, 2012
Mitt Romney talks a lot about
jobs. But does he have a plan to create any?
You can defend President
Obama’s jobs record — recovery from a severe financial crisis is always
difficult, and especially so when the opposition party does its best to block
every policy initiative you propose. And things have definitely improved over the
past year. Still, unemployment remains high after all these years, and a
candidate with a real plan to make things better could make a strong case for
his election.
But Mr. Romney, it turns out,
doesn’t have a plan; he’s just faking it. In saying that, I don’t mean that I
disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that’s a separate point. I
mean, instead, that Mr. Romney’s campaign is telling lies: claiming that its
numbers add up when they don’t, claiming that independent studies support its
position when those studies do no such thing.
Before I get there, however,
let me take a minute to talk about Mr. Romney’s claim that he knows how to fix
the economy because he’s been a successful businessman. That would be a dubious
claim even if he were honestly representing his business career, because the
skills needed to run a business and those needed to manage economic policy are
very different. In any case, however, his portrait of his own experience is so
misleading that it takes your breath away.
For Mr. Romney, who started
as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity,
insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.
I am not making this up. In
Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how
hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican
convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”
Ahem. It’s true that when
Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37
million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing
through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads
associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every
plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing?
But back to the Romney jobs
plan. As many people have noted, the plan has five points but contains no
specifics. Loosely speaking, however, it calls for a return to Bushonomics: tax
cuts for the wealthy plus weaker environmental protection. And Mr. Romney says
that the plan would create 12 million jobs over the next four years.
Where does that number come
from? When pressed, the campaign cited three studies that it claimed supported
its assertions. In fact, however, those studies did no such thing.
Just for the record, one
study concluded that America
might gain two million jobs if China
stopped infringing on U.S.
patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn’t
proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested
that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few
years — but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they
would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the
Romney plan.
Finally, a third study
examined the effects of the Romney tax plan and argued (implausibly, but that’s
another issue) that it would lead to a large increase in the number of
Americans who want to work. But how does that help cure a situation in which
there are already millions more Americans seeking work than there are jobs
available? It’s irrelevant to Mr. Romney’s claims.
So when the campaign says
that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the
technical term, lying — just as it is when it says that six independent studies
support its claims about taxes (they don’t).
What do Mr. Romney’s economic
advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they’re placing their faith
in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate’s victory would
inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In
fact, in his infamous Boca Raton
“47 percent” remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big
boost to the economy simply by being elected, “without actually doing
anything.” And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn’t
about confidence, it’s about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis?
Never mind.
To summarize, then, the true
Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr.
Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear
that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting
instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no
jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment