Conclusion
If conventional wisdom is to be believed, the next President of the United States will be selected on one issue: jobs. As the inaugural post of an ongoing feature examining the positions and records of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, PoliticOlogy takes a look at Mitt Romney’s job plan, examines its claims and analyzes whether it can deliver.
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In the end, Romney's jobs plan is a certainty plan. But it certainty isn’t the problem, and even if it is, it's highly questionable that a President Romney would provide certainty to financial markets that President Obama lacks. Even the editors at Bloomberg, a right-leaning pro-business news oganization, attack this claim:
Business thrives on certainty, to be sure. Obama’s rhetorical broadsides against business leaders aren’t helpful. Nor are declarations like the one by House Speaker John Boehner on May 15, in which he promised another bare-knuckle fight over the debt ceiling. Yet of this you can be certain: You can blame Obama for many things, but uncertainty isn’t one of them.
This claim is borne out by recent surveys of business opinion. The National Federation of Independent Sales Reports finds that uncertainty is far from small business owner's chief concern.
It's lack of demand, not uncertainty, that creates unemployment. And that’s where all of Romney’s jobs plans fail. Apart from reducing marginal tax rates, none of them would stimulate additional demand. In fact, his plans to reduce government spending would actively hurt demand. And Romney seems to recognize this. Recently, in an interview with prominent idiot Mark Halperin, Romney revealed his true colors:
“Halperin: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Because government spending creates jobs. Oh Romney, you Keynesian you. Romney's jobs plan, as posted on his website, isn’t a plan for creating jobs at all. It’s a plan for lowering taxes and reducing regulation. But Romney himself recognizes the link between spendings and jobs. That's more than you can say for the rest of his party. The best we can hope for from a Romney administration is that we get more of this Romney and less of the Republican boilerplate. It's not quite change we can believe in, but it's a start.
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Related Post: Is A Romney Presidency The Best Solvent For Legislative Gridlock?
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