On July 8, 2012, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:
Once upon a time a rich man named Romney ran for president. He could claim, with considerable justice, that his wealth was well-earned, that he had in fact done a lot to create good jobs for American workers. Nonetheless, the public understandably wanted to know both how he had grown so rich and what he had done with his wealth; he obliged by releasing extensive information about his financial history.
But that was 44 years ago. And the contrast between George Romney and his son Mitt — a contrast both in their business careers and in their willingness to come clean about their financial affairs — dramatically illustrates how America has changed.
Right now there’s a lot of buzz about an investigative report in the magazine Vanity Fair highlighting the “gray areas” in the younger Romney’s finances.
The younger Romney’s father, was made personally rich as the President of an auto company, American Motors. We know this because during his run for president, he released not one, not two, but 12 years’ worth of tax returns, explaining that any one year might just be a fluke. From those returns we learn that in his best year, 1960, he made more than $660,000 — the equivalent, adjusted for inflation, of around $5 million today.
But Mitt Romney, who made even more money during his business career at Bain Capital, refuses to release his tax return except for one “selected” year. Unlike his father, the younger Romney didn’t get rich by producing things people wanted to buy; he made his fortune through financial engineering that seems in many cases to have left workers worse off, and in some cases driven companies into bankruptcy. For the first time in American history has a major presidential candidate had a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands, known as a tax haven. The public will never know for sure how he manipulated tax-advantages, whether legitimate or illegitimate, because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal raises suspicions and suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.
This is an issue that must be forced into the open, as Americans have a right to know the truth to assess the merits and character of a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
Mitt Romney’s stated policy agenda is cutting tax rates on the very rich, but does not reveal the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he advocates.
If Romney, who claims to have insightful and practical business experience, then as one who claims to be a leader, should it not be expected of him to level with voters and present a “master plan” for putting the nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice. Would it not seem reasonable that he would have written a book on his economic policy agenda?
To be balanced, President Obama also has not put forward an economic policy agenda either, except for the aiming his policies at creating jobs and returning America to a “full-employment” economy. This has proven to be unsuccessful.
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs. Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial,and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/opinion/krugman-mitts-gray-areas.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share
