Romney and Jobs

Jobs, jobs, jobs--the Republicans have made jobs the central issue in this campaign. Their claim is that President Obama has not done the things needed to improve the economy and create more jobs. In their effort to make Mitt Romney appear to be the businessman capable of bringing real expertise to the economy and creating job growth, they deliberately obscure the facts

The first obscured fact is that when President Obama took office the country was in a terrible recession and millions of jobs had been lost. That recession continued after he was inaugurated, but the recession eventually ended and the economy began to turn around. Through stimulus and bailouts the President has helped add over 4.5 million jobs to the economy. His actions have saved the American automobile industry and the millions of jobs connected to that industry. It is an industry that Romney would have allowed to expire in bankruptcy. The President’s actions have also saved many US banks from going under. Many people criticize the bank bailout, but without it we would probably have gone into a deep depression.

Most people fail to realize what effect the President’s stimulus and bailouts had upon the economy. The Republicans point to the fact that the stimulus did not create the millions of jobs necessary to make-up for the huge loss of jobs during the recession. That is because those programs represented a finger in the dyke that prevented a nightmare collapse of our entire economy. Matt Bai of The New York Times put it this way: “Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.”

Bai went on to describe the effect of the auto bailout: “We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a ‘Lehman risk’ if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.”

The economy has continued to grow. The fact that growth has been slower than desired can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the opposition by congressional Republicans to any bill or program that would stimulate the economy and add jobs. In September 2011, President Obama submitted to Congress his jobs bill, the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It is a bill that economists say would create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. You would think that the second it was introduced the Republicans in Congress would, out of love of country and concern for the lives of working Americans, have supported and enacted it even if they had doubts as to its effectiveness. But no, they blocked the bill and prevented its enactment.

Perhaps in this political world I am being too dramatic when I describe this opposition to any program for job enhancement as cold-hearted and un-American. But think of the robust hypocrisy of Republicans speaking out of one side of their mouths about the need to create jobs while preventing any progress on the jobs bill. How do the millions of unemployed people out there benefit from the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress? It seems that in their zeal to prevent President Obama from being reelected, they have decided that it is in their interest to prevent the economy from rebounding and to prevent the jobs picture from improving. This is a callous abandonment of those millions of people suffering from lack of jobs.

Mitt Romney has put-out a jobs plan which we must assume he would enact if elected president. The question is whether this plan would bring-about the huge increase in jobs necessary to overcome the current stagnation. Keep in mind that in the American Jobs Act of 2011, the President aims to create jobs now, not somewhere down the road. The Act would invest billions in infrastructure, hire more state and local workers, double the size of the payroll tax cut, and add a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. If the Act had been passed back in September 2011, there would, by now, be many thousands of those jobs in evidence. Instead, because of Republican opposition, there is nothing.

Economists have stated that President Obama’s jobs plan is far better than Romney’s. This is because Obama aims to create jobs now. Romney aims to improve the economy so that jobs will be available somewhere in the future. Romney’s plan calls for negotiating trade agreements with Latin America, confronting China’s trade policies, rewriting a new corporate tax code, expanding domestic energy production, building the Keystone pipeline, and cutting taxes on billionaires. While some of these programs might help create jobs in the future, each would take a long time to have a serious effect on the national jobs situation.

In a recent statement  by Romney, you get a taste of his plan to delay immproving the jobs situation and try to upgrade the economy instead : "My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don't have work," he said. "His (Obama's) whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"


So the real jobs candidate is not Mitt Romney. It is President Obama. All Mitt Romney and his party have to do is pass the American Jobs Act of 2011 and get people back to work. Then, once we have a jobs bill in action, the Republicans can sit down with the Democrats and work to enact some of the ideas put forward by Romney.