Does it seem ironic that Romney says Obama has not spent a day in the private sector so he can't know how to create jobs, but Romney's wife supposedly understands what it is like to work outside of the home even though she never did?

Ahhh, I don’t listen to what Romney says. As a matter of fact, I don’t tend to listen to any campaign rhetoric. I try to find independent analysis and base my decisions on that.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians were held accountable for what comes out of their mouth?

Well, I don’t know about the validity of not knowing how to create jobs, since lots of millionaires have done just that with their business ventures. And since his wife isn’t the one saying that she is going to create jobs, I can’t see how what she does or hasn’t done has any bearing at all.

There is so much irony in what Romney says that I have stopped bothering to count it. Blaming Obama for not being tough enough on the Soviet Union and wanting to intervene in Czechoslovakia come to mind. Apparently he doesn’t know the cold war has ended and neither entity currently exists.

Politics are disgusting and to be distrusted. I’m sick of it.

@Sunny2 I disagree. Politics are important and holding yourself above that fray and therefore uninterested in it is an abdication of one of your more fundamental responsibilities.

Note that she was also going on about how hard it was when they were in college with no income; they had to sell some of their considerable stocks to survive.

It is,

I think it was a response to President Barack Obama’s attack on Mitt Romney’s background as a venture capitalist and arguing that profit-making alone is not a qualification for the White House. See the story in the Washington Post

As always, in your rush to ridicule, you miss the point entirely. You don’;t need to know how to drive to fix a car. And knowing how to drive doesn’t mean you know how to fix a car. If you need your car fixed, do you go looking for a good driver or a good mechanic. The economy is stuck. We need jobs. Jobs are created by private industry businesses. We don’t need someone that has been poor so that they understand being poor, we need someone that knows how to create private industry jobs. Being poor is not the prerequisite for that, knowing how to create jobs is. Romney has done that his whole life, Obama hasn’t.

Ann Romney has said that women are telling her that they care about jobs and the economy. That doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch and I’m not even a woman. All of a sudden you want to ridicule her because she hasn’t worked her whole life. If you really want to say she’s wrong, try to show that women really don’t care about jobs or the economy. Good luck with that one.

Try to focus on the skills we need in a president instead of all this kibitzing from the sideline. That’s what Romney is doing. This question is exactly the kind of overblown rhetoric that causes people to get frustrated with elections.

Romney apparently says whatever is politically expedient. Unfortunately, there are a great number of Americans that only listen to him or Fox news. Doing so makes them dumber and even easier to lead. Unfortunately, there are more ignorant or genuinely stupid people in the United States than there are people that actually understand the issues. Ignorance can be cured but stupidity is permanent.

@Jaxk I agreed with the Republicans that Obama was inexperienced when he ran for the Presidency. I think it does matter he has never worked in the private sector. I also agreed with Romney when he said people want to be able to fire those who are doing a crappy job (which the most liberals jumped all over) and I agree that Ann never having had worked doesn’t know what it is like to hold down a full time job that pays for the roof over her head. I call them like I see them, regardless of politcial party.

It’s beyond irony for me. Romney is just a sack of hypocritical animal-abusing neo-con Mormon dung to me.

Mitt Romney’s tried using his wife as a proxy for women as an attempt to deflect questions about Republican policies that hurt women’s interests. His comments to the effect that his wife was informing him that women care about the economy were an attempt at being folksy. “Well, shucks. I’m not a lady, but the lady in my life assures me that other ladies aren’t worried about Republicans assaulting their rights as much as they are about economic issues.”

The real idiocy of that comment is not that his wife doesn’t know what it’s like to hold down a job, it’s that she has no better way of having her finger on the pulse of women in general than Mitt does. It’s not like Ann Romney has a lot of poor and struggling friends giving her first hand accounts of their concerns. Honestly, I doubt that Ann is telling Mitt anything about the women’s vote. That’s what his advisors do (and they also tell him to pretend his wife said it).

The other idiocy of that comment is that women’s issues are economic issues for us. To quote an article from The American Prospect:

“Laws that limit reproductive health care have a direct effect on the economic lives of women. Without the ability to control and delay reproduction, it’s incredibly difficult for women to pursue education, develop careers, and carve out fulfilling, independent lives. A personhood amendment would result in an unprecedented attack on women’s privacy—everything from birth control to a miscarriage could potentially be illegal—and the absence of laws for fair pay would entrench the pay gap between men and women.”

Trying to pretend that caring about the economy means not caring about social issues is just plain ludicrous.

Hilary Rosen, meanwhile, explicitly stated that she agrees with Romney that women care about the economy. Here are her exact words:

“With respect to economic issues, I think actually that Mitt Romney is right, that ultimately, women care more about the economic well-being of their families and the like. But he doesn’t connect on that issue either.”

Rosen then gave Mitt’s folksy put on as an example of this failure to really connect and pointed out that Ann has never worked a day in her life. This is true. Rosen is obviously talking about formal, paid work, after all, not child-rearing (which, as a mother, Rosen surely knows is work in a different sense).

Again, here’s what Rosen actually said:

“Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and how do we—why we worry about their future.”

This is all true, and the point is that Ann Romney is not a good source of information for the real issues at hand. She has never held a job, and she’s never had to worry about how she would feed her kids. Complaining about Rosen’s completely true statement was just more political idiocy.

So to answer the question: no, you can’t simultaneously say that Ann Romney’s lack of experience in the private sector is irrelevant to her opinions on the economy and that President Obama’s lack of experience in the private sector is relevant to his opinions on the economy. That makes no sense. But political rhetoric isn’t about being sensical in the first place.

@Jaxk You’re exactly right about looking for a good mechanic to fix a car. Romney’s job at Bain Capital wasn’t fixing the economy or creating jobs. It was turning a profit for investors, and he did that whether it meant building up a company, off-shoring all its jobs, looting the pension fund and loading on debt only to sell it and let it go into liquidation, whatever it took.

His only stint trying to create jobs was as governor of Massachusetts. Here, he was an abysmal failure. His policies led to heavy job losses in our manufacturing sector. Under him, Massachusetts had the 4th worst jobs record in the nation. And he left the state with a billion dollars in debt.

Obama has a record too. He’s created far more jobs in 3½ years than George W. Bush managed in 8 full years. So if I’m looking for somebody who’s demonstrated they know how to create jobs from the Oval Office, which I am, then Obama is the clear choice.

@Jaxk You were off to a good start. Then you said something near the end of first paragraph that is provably false, thus negating that good start and casting doubt on the rest of your post.

I am focusing on the skills it takes to be president. Given Romney’s track record, I would say that he lacks the skills to be POTUS. He had proven that he has difficulty even when times are not so tough, so why should we trust him to handle problems worse than the ones he already had shown he can’t handle?

@ETpro I follow what’s going on and I never missed a vote yet, but I find the process disheartening at best.

@ETpro You’re not dealing in facts, your dealing in fantasy. You may dislike Romney and that’s fine but Bain capital saved 78% of the companies they invested in. That’s a damned good record for private equity. I’m not going to defend his record as governor since he passed that health care law. How the hell do you create jobs when you increase the cost of hiring. A lesson Obama should learn. And for the record, Obama has a net loss of jobs, Bush did not. If you want to compare each term as president Bush wins hands down. Stop trying to run against Bush and try addressing the dismal record of Obama.

@jerv

You are at least amusing in your position. You say I said something that was…. Let me see, I want to get the quote right..“Then you said something near the end of first paragraph that is provably false”. So prove it false. Just saying that does nothing to improve your credibility. Hell I can say your whole post is provably false. Does that make it so?

@Jaxk Saving 78% of the companies and creating US Jobs are, again, not one and the same thing. It’s not just possible, it’s likely most of those saved companies were saved partly by cutting their domestic workforce and off-shoring jobs. Jobs Romney created in China, Mexico, India, etc. don’t count for this equation.

When Mitt Romney first ran for political office seeking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, he said that at bain he’d presided over creating several thousand jobs. That was probably true. By the time he wanted to be Governor, it had grown to 10,000 jobs. Now it’s hundreds of thousands. If you can point me to any credible evidence showing how many US jobs Bain Capital actually produced minus the ones they killed or sent off shore, I’d be interested in seeing real numbers, not ones that change every time Romney cites them.

Still, what matters is not running a company but running a country. In his only government experience, Romney was an abject failure at job creation. Given that he proposes to return to George W. Bush’s failed economic policy but double down on it, and given that George W. Bush had the worst jobs creation record since Herbert Hoover, I see no reason to be so confident Romney is the man to fix the economy those very policies broke.

And them are Facts, Jaxk.

@Jaxk No need. The stats speak for themselves; you merely seek to interpret them differently. Romney’s record on job creation really isn’t great. So long as you believe that 45,800 = 100,000 though, there really is no proof that can be offered without you shooting it down. That is why I rarely bother citing sources; I am only ever asked by people who won’t allow their minds to be changed anyways.

@ETpro

I am struggling with what facts you’re talking about. I have reread your post several times and there are any facts in it. Unless you consider the fact that you don’t know how many jobs Bain created. I’ll give that as a fact simply because you say so.

It’s almost amusing that you say the numbers change between 1994 and now. Of course they changed over the almost 15 years. And yes the numbers got bigger. If you take Staples, Sports Authority, Gartner Group, and Steel Dynamics, Those four alone created 125,000 jobs. The rest of the corporations added a couple thousand after you add and subtract the ups and downs. Here is a good overview of the jobs created at Bain.

As for Obama he has dropped 1.4 million jobs. That is a net job creation of -1.4 million. Romney created 61,000 jobs over his term in Massachusetts. Whether you consider that a good record or not it at least a positive number vs Obama’s negative number. Spin how ever you want, those are the facts.

@jerv

Fair enough. You can’t back up the numbers or statements. And you feel that anybody that questions you is simply stubborn. How convenient.

@Jaxk Romney doesn’t get to take credit for jobs created when he wasn’t on the watch. If it worked like that, nobody would ever beat George Washington as a job creator.

The link you provide is to the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank and GOP PR firm. They consider 4 companies Bain invested in during Romney’s 15 years at Bain, they credit him with 60,000 jobs in those four firms. None of the firms Bain profited on but drove into liquidation are mentioned. Nor are any of the firms they bought and turned around through off-shoring of jobs. In job numbers, if you are going to count the ups, you have to subtract the losses. And there are no stats on that as far as I can discern.

Here are BLS stats quoted that are dramatically different than your Obama has dropped 1.4 million jobs. Can you show where you came up with that number? Mind you, the GOP that swept into state offices in 2010 on a “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” slogan has been busy firing public sector workers in 31 states so millionaires there could have tax breaks. Thus we’ve seen unprecedented loss of public sector jobs. But even the public sector losses are 607,000, not 1.4 million. And we have actually added jobs despite the GOP’s best efforts to wreck the economy and blame Obama for it. We’ve had 26 straight months of private sector job growth after losing 750,000 jobs per month in the last 3 months of the Bush Administration.

As to Romney’s spectacular jobs record while Governor of Massachusetts, here’s what the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch says.

@Jaxk Basically, I am you, at least in that regard.

@ETpro

Just for the record, you guys seem to be more than happy to tar Romney with the failure at GST Steel even though it happened after Romney left. You can’t have it both ways. If you want to blame Romney for what happened after he left, you have to credit him as well. And I should add that the article I linked covered a lot more companies than just the four I listed. Maybe you didn’t read the article.

I’m not sure how you can dismiss the accounting I linked as a rightwing article and then use you left wing hit piece. I won’t be restricted to using left wing sources, they rarely tell the whole story.

As for government employees, you seem to mix state and local when it fits your storyline. The federal government has expanded while the state and local has contracted. If you want to credit Obama, you need to address the numbers he controls. He has expended federal government by about 10%. I’m still not sure why we’re discussing Bush but if you look at federal employment from 2000 to 2011, Bush kept it fairly flat with a rise in 2008. I’m not sure how you credit the recovery from the 2000 recession to the growth in federal government that occurred in 2008. I’m sure you’ll find a way, I just don’t see it. The major rise in Federal government employees occurred in 2009–20011.

@Jaxk Neither side ever tells the whole story. And personally, I an a little more concerned with government spending than their headcount.

There’s good reason for concern.

@Jaxk When Bush took office in 2001, there were 4,129,000 federal employees. That number did stay relatively flat, expanding a bit then actually dropping to 4,127,000 in 2007 before rising to 4,206 at the end of 2008. Federal employment now is

Here’s Politifact’s fact checking on right-wing hair-on-fire claims about Obama massively expanding the size of the Federal payroll.

State and local jobs most definitely do count. The GOP can be busy in 31 states demonstrating that when they ran on “Jobs, bobs, bobs!” then meant how many they would cut. But don’t expect Democrats to stand silently by as your party deliberately tries to sabotage the economy and blame Obama.

@ETpro

Let me try to get past your hair on fire rhetoric and see if I can decipher your point. I have no problem accepting your Politifact numbers which seem to be between 100,000 and 148,000. It doesn’t change my point so OK.

I don’t know what to make of your state argument. When the Republicans say “jobs, jobs, jobs, they mean private sector jobs not public. I’m not sure where your confusion is here. When the economy was going fairly well the states pumped up their payrolls. Now when the economy has fallen, tax revenues, especially property tax, has declined substantially. The states can print money as the fed does so they have to bring their costs in line. Is that what you mean by sabotaging Obama’s economy. I guess they could have let the states go bankrupt. Hell even Governor Moon Beam here in California is talking about reducing payroll. Is he also trying to sabotage Obama? Get a grip. I’m worried about your blood pressure.

Sorry S/B – states can’t print money

@Jaxk The GOP governors cut taxes for the rich and corporations, then cut state employees and revenue share with localities because they didn’t have the revenue to pay them. This may have nothing to do with Obama. It may just be what today’s GOP thinks we should do. You have Republican members of Congress coming out and claiming that government can’t ever create jobs. These are people who have government jobs. Do they just not notice who signs their paychecks?

If private sector jobs are the only ones that count, then the Obama administration is substantially ahead of the Bush administration. You need to use the same yardstick when measuring.

You’re right that states can’t print money. They do have to balance the budget. But Roadblock Republicans have stalled efforts to send more money to the states so they could avoid laying off teachers, firefighters and police.

@ETpro

“Do they just not notice who signs their paychecks?” Private sector employees and businesses sign their paychecks. ALL government money comes from private sector employees and businesses.

I know we have argued about tax cuts and spending many times. I continue to see the Democratic argument that if taxes were the same as before the cuts we would have billions more in revenue. The problem with that is you have to assume that nothing else changed. That extracting billions from the economy would have no impact on economic growth. I just don’t see how that works. Tax cuts and spending are designed to do the same thing, inject money into the economy. A billion dollar spending spree and a billion dollar tax cut both inject a billion dollars into the economy. The major difference is that a spending spree launders that money through Washington (or the state). In that process, much of it is lost to the bureaucracy and waste. The tax cuts go completely into the economy. The argument is that people spend thier money better than government does. When you extract money from the economy it has the opposite effect, it slows economic growth. And you have the same efficiency model. Extracting the money through higher taxes, slows it more than reduced spending (same laundering effect).

The real difference for me in this environment, is I don’t believe we need more stimulus from either taxes or spending. I think there is enough money in the economy that if we just stabilize the damned thing we would start to grow again. Stop making all these changes and let the damned thing settle out.

I am no fan of Bernanke’s but he has said the interest rates will continue to be stable for the next couple of years. That is an attempt to stabilize the credit markets. It’s a good thing. We need to take a lesson from that and stabilize the rest of the economy by telling everyone taxes won’t change, spending won’t change, and regulation won’t change. Hell, we don’t even need to cut spending or eliminate regulation just stop growing it. Let people and business plan on what will be in place next year.

@Jaxk Thing is, rich people aren’t the only ones that spend. That is why certain parts of the Conservative economic policy make no sense. The top 10% don’t create enough demand for goods/services to keep supply high, and most of the rest of us are not getting any benefit from recent good things happening in the economy (trickle-down never trickles down), so lower demand leads to less need for workers…

You know the rest. But that is considered Socialism, so the key to economic recovery is to do the same things that have kept our economy weak, only more aggressively :/

@jerv

There are good things happening in the economy?

@jerv

I assume you’ve seen the jobs numbers. Nothing good happening there. The key to success I assume you’re looking for is to copy the system that worked so well in Greece.

@Jaxk Judging by the reports I’ve seen that executive bonuses are back up and many larger companies are reporting great (sometimes record) profits over the last couple of years, good things must be happening somewhere.

And the jobs numbers won’t look good so long as people whose wages have stagnated don’t have the discretionary income to buy manufactured goods and overpriced coffee, so there is less need for factory workers and baristas. Such is the price of concentrated wealth.

@jerv

You should be happy to learn that the number of millionaires declined by 129,000 over the past year. Obama’s strategy is working. We’ll get even with those lousy millionaires, we’ll drive them to extinction. Good work. Of course the rest of the world added 175,000 millionaires. Oh well, we attack them as soon as we eliminate our own. I’m sure the American is to have no millionaires so that we don’t have to aspire to better things.

@Jaxk Actually, no, I’m not.

Given the way things are, mere millionaires aren’t exactly rich, at least not all of them. Hell, many of those that were on the low end of millionaire status faced the same issues that many of the merely comfortable felt.

One of the arguments I’ve heard against any sort of remedies to the income inequality is that it would eliminate the incentive to succeed. In fact, that is why I rather like the idea of having millionaires around, But we are rapidly becoming an Oligarchy, and the resulting decline in socio-economic mobility is just as disheartening. In fact, I think it safe to say that the 13 months I spent desperately looking for any job that would take me is more disheartening than paying 20% Capital Gains instead of 15%. Look at the suicide rates amongst the unemployed and I think you will find that I am not the only one that feels that way; I never heard of anybody killing themselves over a 5% tax hike.

Nobody will benefit from it either.

@Jaxk I am not saying that returning the Capital Gains tax back to it’s previous levels will solve anything; that wasn’t the point, so I don’t feel like arguing either way on that.

What I am saying is that we are heading in a bad direction, and it seems like the only possible ways this could go are either status quo (continue our decline) or more of the same (accelerate our descent) because of the policies that the current crop of Conservatives are willing to hold our nation hostage over.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think (and, in fact, highly doubt) that the Democrats can totally pull us out of this nose-dive, but it would be nice if there weren’t so many people advocating kicking in the afterburners and disintegrating sooner, and if some of those that insist that there is no danger would snap back to reality in time to at least not prevent us from leveling out and trying for a rough landing.

So you think we’re headed in the wrong direction and will crash and burn. Yet you support the campaign that says “Foward”. I can see your confusion.

@Jaxk And this money that comes from The Corporations in pay checks. Where does it come from? Does it just spontaneously poof into existence or do corporations obtain it from “taxing” consumers or other corporations they serve? Money is fungible. You know that as well as I do. The current regressive’s insistence that it is magical and that its passing through one set of hands is a blessed and self increasing event whereas another set of hands causes it to poof back out of existence is absurd.

If the US government cancelled all its orders for paper and printers and telephones and radios and weapons and road projects and everything else they order, it would instantly take several trillion dollars in economic activity out of the economy and corporation after corporation that used to supply those goods would either drastically downsize, laying off millions of workers, or go into bankruptcy. You could live tax free, but you would also live government free. Say we outsourced all military to Blackwater, Haliburton and such. Do you honestly think that would reduce the cost? What if we waited for private enterprise to figure out how to monetize every road repair, bridge and sewer project? Would your costs go away, or would they go up?

I sympathize with the right. I realize that there are just a loony a set of ideas on the loony left, and that they probably predate insanity griping the former Conservative wing of the GOP. Many on the left seem convinced that all we need to do to restore prosperity is up the minimum wage to $50 a hour. They see the demand side of economics but are utterly blind to the supply side. But the supply siders are equally blind in insisting there is no concern with demand, and that if we can jet transfer all the wealth of the nation the The Creators all will be well, and The Great and Holy Creators will magically poof into existence 150 million well-heeled consumers to buy what they create.

The only place that comes anywhere close to working is in the one sector of government so near and dear to the Supply SIder heart, the Military Industrial Complex. Supply siders who insist that government spending by FDR made the depression worse (even though it actually ended it before Pearl Harbor) are perfectly happy with admitting that government spending on a previously unheard of scale during WWII stimulated the economy and brought full employment.

Military spending does create its own demand. Once you’ve built all the bullets and bombs, you just have to go out and blow something up with them. But it’s the most destructive form of government spending there is. It’s no more productive than the mythical project of hiring workers to truck water from the Pacific to the Atlantic to equalize the ocean levels on both sides of the American continents. Building useful infrastructure, a smart electrical grid hardened against solar flares, a nationwide fiberoptic network for the communications of the 21st century and beyond, and upgrading public education through graduate degree levels for all who are capable of doing the work; these would create far more long-term growth than blowing things up.

If Europe weren’t such a drag on our economy, I think you might be right that backing off stimulus and letting things stabilize themselves would work. But Europe is what it is, and it’s going to dip into a serious second-phase recession. Since the US Dollar is the only stable currency around right now, out borrowing costs are at an all time low. I think we should get the US back to full employment then focus our economic engine’s strength on giving Europe a jump start in economic activity.

BTW, here’s the numbers on public sector versus private sector jobs since this recession started.

@Jaxk Given that this is a two-party system, it’s more like, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I will take incompetence over malice every time.

@ETpro

We seem to continue this argument is black and white. Either all government or no government. Either all private sector or no private sector. That is the reason we never find any common ground. I think government is too big but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for some functions. You asked if the military would be more efficient if privatized. I believe it would but that’s not what I want. There is more to the military than just efficiency. Roads however I have mixed feelings. We have a road here that was expanded by private enterprise. The expansion is toll (a commuter lane) that pays for the expansion. Those that need to save the time use it, those that don’t use the non commuter lanes. It turns out that for every 10 minutes you save using the commuter lane the rest of the users (non commuter lane traffic) saves two minutes. Everybody wins, those that pay more win more but everybody wins.

Capital creation is not magic. Another argument that tends to shut off any chance of agreement. Capital creation is the natural result of productivity and efficiency gains. Products cost less so the sell more or you save time so you can do more. In the 80s women got jobs in droves. The conventional wisdom is that they needed to go to work to supplement household incomes. That may be true but it certainly isn’t the whole story. They went to work because they could. In the old days, wash day was exactly that, a full day. Wash the clothes, hang them up to dry and then iron them. Some of that quite often fell into the next day. By the 80s that was no longer a full time job. Hell, with washers and dryers, permanent press, and cleaning becoming so cheap, it’s hardly much time at all. Most of the daily routine has been automated, you can even vacuum while you’re at work with a robot. They freed up enough time from the household chores that it is no longer necessary to have a full time person working in the house. That’s productivity at work. Now with the house freed from most of the manual labor, both parties can work and bring in income, which allows them to buy even more stuff and increasing demand. Everything has been automated, even watering the flowers used to take a few hours now it’s on a timer. All that automation creates jobs and frees up time to do more stuff. It works the same way in industry. As we increase productivity we lower costs and get more work done.

Government doesn’t really do that. They don’t produce anything nor make our lives more productive. Before we argue about the productivity of the last three years let me address it. There are a lot of articles about the productivity increase of the past few years (since the recession started). I don’t see that. Productivity is difficult to measure. Most of the measurement is strictly sales vs headcount. same sales less headcount and you have a productivity gain. But if you merely reduce headcount and let customers wait on hold for longer periods of time, is that a productivity gain or merely reducing services. I contend we have no real productivity gain but rather a reduction of services. I suppose I could drone on for a few more paragraphs about this but I’ll let it go. There’s nothing magic about wealth creation nor why it works the way it does. Only inflammatory rhetoric.

@Jaxk I think that is where I get misunderstood a lot since I am against both extremes.

As for both parties in bringing in income allowing them to buy more stuff, you are aware that bread is no longer 17 cents a loaf, right? I used to be able to fill my car’s tank for under $30 not terribly long ago, but now it costs $40–45. I used to be able to get a gallon of milk for $1.99, now it’s $2.39. Note that both increases are far larger than any increase in household income in many households? I guess by “buying more stuff”, you mean “making enough to survive because one income is no longer enough to live on”. Many people are buying less and merely paying more for it. I know my discretionary income has been eaten up by rising costs and stagnant wages.

@jerv

You need to understand why that is happening if you want to fix it. And isn’t this administration telling us that there is no inflation?

Government not only doesn’t produce anything, it actually works against productivity. Regulations add costs and time to the production of goods and services, that reduces productivity. Taxes tend to increase the cost of goods, again reducing productivity. Government doesn’t create wealth it reduces it. As we continue down this road of growing government, all the issues you note will be exacerbated.

“Forward”

@Jaxk As do you. But you are so wrapped up in pushing deregulation that you refuse to see anything other than the evils of regulation and of government, so you think that the solution is to amplify the cause of the problem.

Until you get past that, nothing productive can be accomplished by me staying in this discussion.

@Jaxk Interesting. I never intentionally said ANYTHING to suggest I wanted all jobs to be public sector. If something I wrote suggested that to you, it was certainly not my intent, because I come nowhere cclose to believing in that. I am a capitalist. You know I own a private enterprise. And here I saw you wanting to support ONLY private sector employment. I totally agree we need a healthy mix of both.

Also, as a business owner now for 27 years, I am well aware of the need for productivity increases. We have had those. The American worker today if the most productive worker on Earth. It’s the other things we are doing wrong that are largely preventing that from translating into more jobs and better pay for thos who have jobs.

Romney has not spent one day with large groups of people whose lives are really tough.

@ETpro

I was trying to get us off this ‘all or nothing’ debate. It’s never productive.

In the book ‘Greenspan’ he says that Greenspan spent his entire time as head of the Fed trying to measure Productivity. He couldn’t do it. It’s simply too job specific to get a good handle on it. The reports that we have increased productivity over the past three years, I just don’t believe (my opinion).

It is the new ideas that spur productivity growth. New startups not only create jobs but they also supply the innovation that brings productivity growth. New start ups are trending down. While we focus on the multinational companies and whether they are making money or not, the real engine for growth is being killed.

@Jaxk On that last point, we agree. Let’s not push our luck. :-)

I am tired of the right wing talking points, prosperity does not “trickle down” and reducing taxes and regulations does not increase job growth, unless you want to grow jobs in a third world country. What actually increases jobs and grows the economy is a strong vibrant middle class. They will have disposable income to buy things, increasing demand, which increases jobs.

The rich are job exporters or, at best, have a neutral impact on job creation. When the middle class prospers, everybody prospers.

Think of it this way, a kid in high school has a much better chance to become middle class than to become rich. The only way to become middle class is to get a decent paying job or starting your own business. The rich have no incentive to do either.