On July 5, 2012, Mark Z. Barabak writes in the Los Angeles Times that Mitt Romney and President Obama have taken opposite positions on the big issues, but neither has provided much detail.
Mitt Romney is famously data-driven, a relentless distiller of facts and consumer of cleareyed, unsentimental analyses. The approach built Romney a fortune in business and is helping guide his quest for the White House.
But when it comes to evaluating what a Romney presidency would look like, the former Massachusetts governor often gives voters precious little in the way of detail.
He promises to cut taxes, but fails to explain how he’d pay for the move without ballooning the federal deficit. He opposes President Obama‘s directive allowing hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to stay in the country, but won’t say whether he would reverse that order. He criticizes the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, but doesn’t state how he would handle it differently.
A 59-point economic plan — unveiled in the primary season and little noted since — includes some specifics, such as trimming the federal workforce by 10% through attrition. But many proposals are scarcely more than general goals, such as undertaking “a fundamental restructuring of government programs and services.”
Although Obama has given some greater detail, he too has been vague in outlining what the next four years might bring. He has stated certain things he would like to do in a second term: end the upper-income tax cuts passed under PresidentGeorge W. Bush, fight global warming, adopt new clean-energy standards, tackle immigration reform. The latter would fulfill a promise he made the first time he ran.
Yet much of what Obama has discussed amounts to preserving things already accomplished, including financial rule changes passed after the near economic meltdown in 2008 and, foremost, seeing through implementation of his signature domestic achievement, the sweeping healthcare measure upheld last week by the Supreme Court.
Really, the BIG ISSUE is not being presented or discussed!!
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.
