“A No Show At A Mob Front”: Mitt Romney’s Unnecessary Lie
If you’re planning on running for president, here are a few quick things you should probably do:
- Make sure your tax returns and finances are in order
- Make sure you’re not blatantly lying about some major portion of your biography.
Mitt Romney seems to have decided to do neither, I guess because he thought no one would check? Maybe Romney should have taken his fortune out of the various offshore tax havens where he stores it before he decided to run for president, because the thing is every presidential candidate is going to be prodded to release his tax returns and financial information. If you don’t want to be criticized for a Swiss bank account and a mysterious $102 million IRA, either don’t run for president or don’t have those things!
But much, much more important than not looking like a shady tax-dodger is “not telling a fairly easily disprovable lie.” Like “I quit Bain Capital in 1999,” a thing Mitt Romney says all the time when he wants to respond to criticism of various awful things Bain Capital has done since 1999. Except the Boston Globe (and Mother Jones and TPM) have now reported that Romney continued to be Bain Capital’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” until a couple years after 1999. Romney was drawing at least $100,000 a year from Bain Capital and was still listed as the guy in charge on SEC documents and financial disclosures through 2002.
What’s worse is that his resigned in February 1999 line was even apparently contradicted by multiple contemporary news accounts, with two from August of 2001 saying Romney had just or was about to quit Bain. The New Yorker’s Andrew Prokop says, “It seems clear there was a period 1999-2001 where Romney was retaining the CEO job because he thought he might return to it after Olympics,” which flatly contradicts Romney and Bain’s statements. Romney’s best defense, as Andrew Sullivan points out, is that he was drawing a massive salary for doing nothing — like a “no-show” at a mob front.
The only reason Romney wanted everyone to think he quit Bain completely in 1999 to begin with was in order to avoid being accused of being responsible for “outsourcing.” Now, I am 100 percent positive that Romney, as a rich conservative former financial professional, does not consider outsourcing a bad thing. He almost definitely considers it a net positive for the American (and world) economy. The fact is, most elected Democrats support policies that encourage outsourcing — on this there is basically universal consensus among the political and economic elite. Romney — and plenty of others! — believe that companies like Bain Capital perform a public good, even though to some it just looks like parasitic capitalism at its worst. But: Outsourcing and closing down factories and slashing wages and busting unions and laying people off are all things Mitt Romney supports on a philosophical level, and I’m sure it’s galling to him that he has now been caught in a lie designed to cover up actions he feels were totally right and beneficial for the nation as a whole.
How much will it hurt him, that everyone now knows he is a liar? I am guessing “Swiss bank account” actually “hurts” him more, because the Romney campaign was smart enough to call Obama a liar at the exact same time as the national media was getting ready to call him a liar, and for your average person, that just sounds like two politicians saying mean things about each other.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 12, 2012
Why The GOP’s ‘Job Creators’ Are Hard to Find
If you’re a “job creator,” raise your hand. It would be nice to know who you are, exactly.
Republicans negotiating with President Obama over a fix for the nation’s debt problems have been rolling out the heavy buzzwords lately, and there must have been a fresh memo about the sonorous ring of “job creators.” House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly decries tax hikes on job creators, with congressional colleagues such as Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling forming a job-creators chorus behind him. House Republicans recently published a “Plan for America’s Job Creators” (but not for everybody else, presumably) and if you’re an aggrieved job creator, you can let House Majority Leader Eric Cantor know what’s bugging you by filling out a brief form at http://jobs.majorityleader.gov/.
The trouble is, job creators are an endangered species these days. The biggest problem in the U.S. economy, in fact, is a shortage of job creators to reward and protect. Companies are barely hiring, and there are about 7 million fewer jobs now than there were at the end of 2007, when the Great Recession began. Part of the Republicans’ plan is to lower taxes, streamline regulation, open more trade and take other steps that will stimulate job creation. But we’ve already tried some of that, including several rounds of tax cuts since 2008. Most job creators are still hiding.
Big companies employ a lot of Americans, but over the last few years they’ve been better at job destruction than job creation. Between 2007 and 2010, companies with more than 1,000 employees shed about 2.6 million jobs, according to the latest data from the Labor Department. Many big companies have rebounded sharply from the recession, with impressive profits and a lot of cash on hand. But even some of the most successful big companies aren’t doing much job creation–not in the United States, anyway. Here are a few examples:
General Electric, which is run by the same Jeffrey Immelt who chairs President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, axed 32,000 jobs worldwide between 2007 and 2010, according to information from GE’s annual reports. About 22,000 of those lost jobs were in the United States. No job creation there, even though GE earned about $12 billion in profits in 2010.
Exxon Mobil has added about 2,800 jobs worldwide since 2007, but the giant oil firm doesn’t break out how many of those new hires work in the United States. Since Exxon earns nearly 70 percent of its revenue from overseas, it’s a good bet that’s where most of the new jobs are, too.
Wal-Mart has added about 40,000 jobs in the United States since 2007, largely because the discount retailer has been a beneficiary of pinched consumers desperate to save money. But it has added about 150,000 jobs overseas during the same time–nearly four times the U.S. tally. Still, Wal-Mart seems to be one company that can legitimately call itself a job creator.
IBM has added about 40,000 employees since 2007, but like Exxon, it doesn’t say where. About 65 percent of IBM’s revenue comes from abroad, and that’s where almost all of its revenue growth has come from since 2007. IBM’s U.S. business is actually down from 2007 levels, so it’s possible that most or all of IBM’s new hires have been overseas.
Big companies, in fact, aren’t considered a big source of new jobs. While they generate a lot of profits, they also tend to be mature enterprises more likely to swallow other companies and consolidate market share, which tends to eliminate jobs, not create them. “It’s the job of big firms to shed jobs,” says Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffmann Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. “Big firms want to lower costs, which means lowering labor costs.”
Young firms, Schramm says, account for virtually all net job creation in the U.S. economy over the last 30 years. That’s because startups that survive their first couple of years tend to be vibrant, fast-growing companies that create new industries and hire a lot of new workers. Think Microsoft and Oracle in the 1980s, and Amazon, eBay, and Google in the 1990s. Today, new technology-based firms like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, and LinkedIn represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy. However, they’re the last companies that need any kind of tax relief–and they’re not about to ask for special treatment from Washington, either. They became transformative companies without Washington’s help, and they’d like to keep it that way.
Politicians routinely extol the virtues of “small business,” but that’s not really where the job creators are, either. Conventional small businesses–dry cleaners, nail salons, delicatessens, independent professionals like lawyers and doctors–tend to be important pillars of their communities, but they also come and go without generating a lot of new jobs, on balance. During the third quarter of 2010 (the most recent quarter for which there’s data), firms with fewer than 20 employees eliminated 34,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department. The biggest gains were among firms with 500 to 999 employees, which created 37,000 jobs.
So if Republicans want to modify the tax code to reward and encourage job creators, they need to come up with a scheme that offers the lowest tax rates to fast-growing startups, some medium-sized firms, and a few select multinationals. Of course, they might prefer to lower taxes on everybody who could be a job creator–because that includes almost everybody. If you ever spend money, that makes you a job creator, in the most expansive sense of the phrase, since somebody gets paid to provide whatever you buy. But then we’d have to figure out whether to reward American consumers for helping create jobs in China, Japan, Sri Lanka, or wherever the imported goods they purchase come from, or to reward people who spend money that helps create American jobs. So if you buy a Lexus made in Japan or Gucci loafers made in Italy, you’re not really a creator of American jobs and you shouldn’t be eligible for favorable tax treatement. But if you have your kitchen remodeled by a local contractor or go to a chiropractor for back pain, you qualify. It’s not so easy being a job creator. Or locating one.
By: Rick Newman, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
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