ROMNEY'S CRITIQUE
"Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama inherited a recession. But unlike them, he has made it worse, not better," Mitt Romney said Thursday in an opinion piece in USA Today.
"His failure to stem the unemployment tide should not have been a surprise. With no experience whatsoever in the world of employment and business formation, he had no compass to guide his path. Instead, he turned over much of his economic recovery agenda to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, themselves nearly as inexperienced in the private sector as he. Congress gave him and them everything they asked for, including a history-making three-quarters of a trillion dollar stimulus," said Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
"But it did little to stimulate the real economy - where jobs are created. Studies, initiatives and programs that liberal think tanks had long pined for were given life even as the private economy was on life support. The president's team assured us that their massive stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. So with unemployment now at 10.2 percent, it is clear that their stimulus was a miscalculated failure.
"In an attempt to disguise the truth, the administration has touted inflated figures of jobs 'created.' But every month, in good times and bad, jobs are created and jobs are lost. What matters is the net difference between the two numbers. Focusing solely on jobs created while ignoring the far greater numbers of jobs lost is Harry Houdini economics.
"Growing government, as was done with the stimulus, inevitably depresses the private sector and job creation. Shrinking government and reducing government jobs is healthier for the economy, but this option was never seriously considered. That's no wonder: As White House guest logs for the first half of the year reveal, the most frequent visitor to the executive mansion was Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, which represents government workers." |
