Mitt’s Real Job Record
GOP Frontrunner Mitt Romney has taken a beating, and rightfully so, in recent weeks over his time at the investment firm Bain Capital. The kind of leveraged buyouts and speculative investments the firm specialized in often came with major layoffs for the companies involved.
Romney claims he actually created jobs during his time at Bain — to the tune of some 100,000 new positions. But, as Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post points out, this number “obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.”
Worse still, the figure includes current employment stats at Bain-related firms — not the numbers from the time that Romney was actually with the firm.
Often, the “restructuring” Bain demanded from companies it took over or invested in entailed massive cuts in the work force. Romney has taken to simply ignoring the estimated tens of thousands of jobs such cuts destroyed. And he’s brazen enough to claim he’s actually responsible for the job growth at companies after they severed ties with Bain.
Additional reporting from the Wall Street Journal finds that of the companies Bain invested in while Romney was in charge, over a fifth filed for bankruptcy or shuttered completely. Another 8 percent faired so poorly that all of the money invested by Bain was lost.
Romney flaunts his experience building up brand name companies like Staples. But, as any baseball player will tell you, one big hit doesn’t mean you’re a great hitter. It’s consistency that counts. And dozens of companies — both big and small — evaporated under Mitt’s watch.
And do we really want more Domino Pizza-style jobs? The jobs Bain was able to create tended to pay much less than the positions they replaced. Romney and his colleagues would make a point of grinding down the jobs they kept to the nub, stripping away benefits, overtime, health care, pensions and paid holidays– all in hopes of squeezing out a bigger return for themselves. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman puts it:
The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues… is that they destroyed good jobs…. The jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.
In New Hampshire, Romney told voters “I like being able to fire people.” To 27 million unemployed and underemployed Americans, that statement sent a chill down their spines. Whatever its context, his quote disqualifies him in the eyes of the jobless. They’ve been there; they’ve seen the same kind of gee-isn’t-this-fun attitude from CEO’s when pink slips were handed out.
Fortunately, there is another approach, a blueprint for stimulating real job growth.
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the Works Progress Administration. It gave 8.5 million men and women an opportunity to get back to work. And it modernized this country by enlisting ordinary citizens to build extraordinary things: 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 buildings, and countless infrastructure improvements.
Our Grave Recession mirrors the Great Depression. The solutions FDR created would work today if given half a chance.
