“Having been in the private sector for 25 years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand,” Mitt Romney told Time.
On May 24, 2012, Ezra Klein posts the following on his Wonkblog:
“But then how does Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has spent his entire career in politics, understand job creation so well? Ryan and Romney, after all, have proposed essentially the exact same economic policies. And Ryan proposed most of them first. If Romney’s ideas are informed by knowledge you can only collect in the private sector, how come they don’t differ more from the ideas of career Republican politicians?
“Politicians of different parties tend to have very different ideas. But politicians of different backgrounds differ less in their policy preferences than you might think. Opening a small business, working as a community organizer, and running a private-equity firm are all valuable life experiences, but they don’t tell you how fast to bring down the deficit, or whether the mix should tilt toward taxes or spending cuts, or what sort of reforms could improve Medicaid, or what Congress will accept, or what sort of fiscal policy is appropriate given the risks from Europe, or how to weigh the long-term risks of climate change.
“Anyone who walked into the Oval Office and really thought they had some special insight as to what to do because they had been an early investor in Staples would be a disaster. Luckily, there’s no evidence that Romney, who ran a perfectly successful, conventional administration in Massachusetts, actually believes that nonsense.
“His past suggests he governs pragmatically, and his current policy proposals — not to mention the fact that, if elected, he’ll almost certainly be working with a Republican House and Senate — suggest he thinks governing pragmatically would mean governing as something of a generic Republican. There’s literally no unusual or out-of-the-box policies that he’s proposed and that you can best explain by reaching back to his work at Bain.”
Yet, while Romney and Ryan are both rich men due to their productive capital asset holdings and draw on dividend income derived there from, neither puts forth the GOAL of empowering ordinary Americans to acquire productive capital ownership in the future assets of our business corporations and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings (future savings) of the investments (using the same financial mechanisms to further their own ownership holdings). If ownership and the resulting dividend income is good for Romney (who professes to understand how the American capitalistic economic system works) then why not stand up as a true leader and lead the nation by introducing policies and programs that will result in broadened productive capital ownership among ordinary Americans in America’s business corporations?
Of course, President Obama, as well, has yet to tackle this challenge.
Once this GOAL becomes the national political focus we will see an unbelievable discussion of workable plans to realize the GOAL of broadened private, individual ownership of the productive capital assets (superautomation, machines, robotics, digital computerized processes, etc.) of our business corporations . Remember that planning begins with a vision and a goal. This is not rocket science but it does require national leadership. Implementation requires amending a few laws that basically authorize the transactions that will broaden productive capital ownership paid for with the future earnings (future savings) of the capital investment. Allowing such transactions will provide incentives for profitable opportunities to employ unused capacity and promote stable economic growth, with the ancillary benefit of creating “real” job growth.
