Posted on 05/23/2012 4:11:33 PM PDT by Libloather
Romney vows to lower jobless rate in first term to 6 percent
By Jonathan Easley - 05/23/12 02:01 PM ET
Mitt Romney says his administration would lower the unemployment rate to 6 percent by the end of his first term.
“I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, and perhaps a little lower,” Romney says in a Time magazine interview.
The 6 percent prediction is a bold claim that Romney will surely be held to by Democrats if he’s elected.
When Obama took office in January 2009, unemployment stood at 7.8 percent and rose throughout the year, peaking at 10 percent in October. It’s been slowly declining since, hitting 8.1 percent in April, although job growth has slowed in recent months.
“This is a President who spends his time blaming other people for the fact that he has been unsuccessful in turning around this economy,” Romney says in the Time interview. “And I think the reason you’re seeing across the country, people saying they’d like to try someone new, is because they believe this President, while he may be a nice guy, is simply not up to the task of helping guide an economy.”
Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt pushed back immediately.
"Romney moved the goalposts in just a matter of weeks,” LaBolt said in a conference call with reporters. “He said 4 percent a couple weeks ago."
In May, Romney said “anything under 4 percent [unemployment] is nothing to celebrate.”
LaBolt questioned how Romney intended to “get to 6 percent without supporting some of the president’s programs” and said "government economists have been clear” that under their projections the jobless rate was already expected to fall below that figure.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the unemployment rate will drop to 5.3 percent by the end of 2016.
In his Time interview, Romney also said that if elected, he hopes lawmakers won’t enact major fiscal reforms during the lame-duck session, despite what many believe to be a looming crisis in 2013 if Congress fails to enact budget and tax reform.
“My preference would be to have the opportunity to do that after the election as opposed to have the President in a lame-duck session try and create a solution that may not be in keeping with the new administration,” Romney says.
Speaking before The Latino Coalition in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Romney continued to hammer the president over what he says are policies that are unfriendly to business.
“Sadly, President Obama has decided to attack success,” Romney said. “It’s no wonder so many of his own supporters are calling on him to stop this war on job creators. Make no mistake, when I am president, you won’t wake up every day and wonder if the president is on your side. In recent days we’ve heard a lot about business from the president, and if you’re feeling like you deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act, I can’t blame you.”
Polls show voters rank the economy as the most important issue in the upcoming elections.
Some Republicans allege current unemployment figures break a prediction by the White House that the jobless rate wouldn’t top 8 percent after the passage of stimulus measures early in his administration. Fact-checking group Politifact, however, says that claim is mostly false, and stems from a report by two economic advisers that was couched in uncertainty, and not from Obama.
In recent days, the Obama campaign has hit back at Romney's claims that he can turn around the economy by focusing on his career at Bain Capital, saying that a career spent maximizing profits for a private-equity firm doesn’t give him the experience he needs to create jobs to boost the nation's economy.
Milt won’t have to do a thing. Once the voters throw the Marxist Kenyan’s ass out of the Oval Orifice and SCOTUS deems Barry’s CommieCare as being unconstitutional, the economy will takeoff on its own.
Lift your eyes above the wallet.
It can be done, there is no need to ask how.
Any grumblings of "if not, I won't seek reelection"?
I don't if it is Romney who is like 0bama or if it is 0bama who is like Romney.
What did he do illegally? (vote fraud or rigging)
There he goes again! The idiot doesn't get it and never will.
Oh yeah???? Well Obama will see your 6 and RAISE you....umm......never mind.
One thing is for sure...if Romney is elected, and even if it starts looking like a sure thing, unemployment will start to drop. A large percentage of American businesses aren’t hiring now out of fear of a second Obozo term.
I don’t know what economic plans George Soros has proposed for his candidacy (he did run for president didn’t he? for one weekend?)
If he pulls it off, the media will say all drops in unemployment are “unexpected”, it will be a jobless recovery (or if forced to acknowledge unemployment going down will say, “yeah, but they are McJobs”, and will be touted the biggest financial crisis since the great depression.
We don’t need any more President’s acting as if Federal economic central planning should be deciding the fate of the economy.
For every economist that agrees with Romney, there are just as many who might disagree, and all the things in and out of government that have not yet happened and/or not yet decided, in and out of the United States can potentially be as big a factor as any mere tax policy decisions a President seeks for Congress to approve.
Centralized government forecasting precise economic outcomes down the road represent a mythological potential of a Presidents actions and a political minefield as well. The actual number of variables that will decide the fate of the economy over time far exceed any President’s grasp.
When we put such notions behind us and instead simply promote and expect the morally and economically best policies, because they are the best policies, morally and economically, the Liberty of the people and their markets will take care of the results.
If government has any pro-active roll it should NOT be in trying to shape the economy, but merely trying to provide the best legal and tax framework for a free market economy to flourish - which does not expect a Utopian result - and very short term, very temporary, very limited safety nets for those who will fall too far economically during any “down” cycles that will inevitably develop.
Government attempts to directly manipulate the economy by government policy and taxing interventions, to avoid or get out of “down cycles” has only made them worse, longer and more systemic.
Romney is showing he will not be a transformational President, loosening the economy from Federal strangulation. He wants that control as badly as Obama, he just thinks, in error, his “doing better” at Federal manipulation will work. It won’t. The economy desperately needs a revolution in what the government is and is not expected to do.
If there are frankly statist economic policies that Mitt is proposing today thinking that it would be better than a lot of laissez-faire, then by all means shout the specifics of that to the rooftops — but even then, keep a sense of proportion. What’s worse, one skunk or an acre of open air sewage plant?
Mitt’s at least in a position to appreciate what the golden rule would mean towards business and can’t want too badly to risk strangling that part of America’s economic engine. Obama never was.
The long term problem for the future of our Republic is to get the Federal government out of the position whereby it thinks it can micro-manage the economy to health by special laws and/or tax policies in the first place.
Instead of proposing to “change” certain special tax rates (like corporate dividends), a transformational President would be proposing universal flat tax rates, corporate and personal, no exceptions, exemptions or deductions so that all corporate and personal economic decisions could be based on the most economically efficient choices without being bent by any tax considerations.
Everyone would pay something and at the same rate, without excuses - and without accountants, without tax lawyers, without lobbyists, without politicians attempting to game the system in a hunt for next seasons campaign contributions - except for a floor above the very most needy.
Then the economy can and will perform without new and special rules every season from Presidents and Congress.
Mitt is not that President. He will continue holding and executing the Federal beast created by FDR (and he will enjoy doing so) and he will leave it intact when he leaves. He will do no more than make adjustments at the edges, not at the core.
I am not saying that on the Margin he won’t be better than Obama - a feat a frog could do - he will, but only at the edges. Better made be good enough to chose him over Obama. That does not change the fact that it won’t be enough better in the long run and that does not alter the need to kill the concept that the Federal government can and should make long-term economic predictions - implying it can make them come true, nor is it enough better for us to hope for once we’d get a true Conservative candidate that would quit making them, and quit wanting and expecting to be the nation’s economic savior.
What is the worst economic fact about Obama? His economic predictions and how wrong he was? No. His intellectual arrogance that the President is (and ought to be) the economic manager of the nation.
Best case scenario is for Romney to keep the seat warm for Scott Walker in 2016.
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