Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,(
I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman
Sunday Talk Soup: The Spin of Robert Gibbs Part 1
Here is part of the standard talking point script from Sunday's Meet the Press transcript:
Well, look, the biggest idea that we're running on is to continue moving in the right direction of fixing this economy. Look, the last six months of the Bush administration we lost 3.5 million jobs. And we know this about Mitt Romney. He's not a job creator. When he was governor of Massachusetts they were 47th out of 50 in job creation.
His experience is in downsizing and outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies and walking away with a lot of money for himself. His economic ideas are the failed economic ideas that we tried for eight years. Tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and letting Wall Street going back to writing the rules all over again. That is the policies that got us into this mess.
This president wants to build on 25 consecutive months of private sector job growth, 4.1 million jobs. And to really institute some strong values of fairness and responsibility. Build an economy that lasts. Invest in our children and in their college education. Make this country strong. Make this economy vibrant. And continue on the path to adding jobs in it.As I've stated before in recent posts, the Obama reelection campaign is already in reruns. Let's start with the statistic that during Romney's tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 in job creation under Romney. PolitiFact reviewed this claim 11 months ago after this was part of the Democratic spin by DNC Chair Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz, David Axelrod, (and yes) Robert Gibbs, and others: and rated it a half-truth. Whereas the statistic was based on BLS, the fact is that Romney inherited a state already reeling from job losses. But a governor has only limited influence over the state economy.
For example, Romney inherited a state with a high tax/regulatory burden and a state legislature that was dominated by up to 85% Democrats, not to mention a state heavily vested in the New Economy (university-rich environment, high tech and biotechnology), particularly affected by the 2000-2002 Nasdaq stock market crash (recall that at its peak, Nasdaq in March 2000 (under President Clinton) reached its peak of 5048.62 and 12 years later stands roughly 2000 points lower). Other states, say, Texas, would stand to gain during a recovery simply by virtue of a preexisting business-friendly cost base and/or a more diversified economy.
So let's have a reminder of what Romney inherited. This is from the Boston Globe in early 2003, shortly after Romney was inaugurated:
Massachusetts is number one in the nation in job losses, shedding 4.7 percent of all jobs over the last two years. The state has lost 71,000 manufacturing jobs, or 17 percent; 69,000, or nearly 14 percent, of all jobs in the professional and business services sector; and nearly 18 percent of all jobs in the information industry.And, of course, Bill Clinton, just like Barack Obama, could "feel the pain" of the Massachusetts public sector unions:
By contrast, just 0.7 percent of federal, state, and local jobs in Massachusetts - 3,000 people in all - have been cut in the same period, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.Now let's look at this quote during a gubernatorial debate just before Romney's election:
“There's a $300 million shortfall. There is a $2 billion structural deficit confronting Massachusetts. The budget is $23 billion, 40% of which is off the table because of court mandates and laws that you must provide that kind of funding. With the remaining $12 billion, you have to find $2 billion...”The situation worsened for Governor-Elect Romney:
The current budget was running a deficit of approximately half a billion dollars, with about $650 million of deficit spending left to go before that budget expired. And the upcoming state budget for the year would have a deficit of nearly $3 billion if the budget was not cut or taxes increased. Senate President Robert E. Travaglini expressed the view that“taxes will have to be raised to cope with the budget crisis, and said he and his Senate colleagues will lead the charge for new revenues...Romney was unable to get the Democrats to agree to an across-the-board general tax cut from 5.3% to 5%, but he stopped the counterproductive capital gains increase--and eventually won a capital gains tax cut, budgeted for the 5% tax rate and not only balanced the budget every year but left a rainy day fund and tax relief for seniors and young families.
It's true that Romney's job growth record was a tepid 1.6% (50,763/3229188) from Feb. 2003 to Jan. 2007 using employed numbers from BLS here. But I would argue that it doesn't tell the whole story: year-over-year accelerating employment changes improved in an upward trend, and the Romney campaign claims that Massachusetts was #7 most improved nationally, improving from #49 to #36 in job creation among the states and dropping unemployment from 5.6% to 4.7%
But there are a couple of other very salient points that the Obama campaign are for obvious reasons overlooking. There's a story that goes beyond tax and regulatory policy. For instance, there are over 50 colleges in the metropolitan Boston area, including world-class Harvard and MIT. Start-up companies are well-known. (The high school district champion of the Texas UIL science contest was accepted at MIT for or during his junior year; his freshman little sister, a classmate, lobbied for me to succeed him. I did win district the next 2 years (I graduated early, the school's initiative), but MIT didn't recruit me. Anyway, my predecessor never did finish up his MIT degree, but he got involved in some related MIT-affiliated startup which became highly successful; he was pulling a salary well into the six-figures and when the company was acquired sometime in the 1980's (while I was working towards my doctorate), he sold his share for over $1M. His sister left school after her freshman year and I found her through a reunion website. She told me about his business success and says that he owns an apartment facing Harvard.)
In any event, the non-profit Kauffman Foundation has created an index based on 26 factors (educated workforce, numbers of startups, etc.) designed to rank states in terms of resources and policies enabling the more entrepreneurial, globally-connected, higher technology New Economy:
The state farthest along the path to the New Economy is Massachusetts. Topping the list in 1999 and 2002, Massachusetts' lead over other states in 2007 has increased—with a concentration of software, hardware, and biotech firms supported by universities such as MIT, Harvard, and others. The state had the fourth-highest increase in per capita income, according to the study.Okay, Robert Gibbs: what am I missing? Governor Romney took office in what newspapers and others called the greatest fiscal and economic crisis that Massachusetts had faced since the 1930's. He cuts taxes over a dozen times, balances the budget 4 years, cuts unemployment to under 5%, and leaves a rainy day fund, refuses to approve the general tax increase and program funding restorations the 85% Democrat state legislature demand, and the state has the fourth highest per capita income gain in the country and stretches its lead position as the best place to start a New Economy business in the country under his tenure.
Let see--Romney succeeded acting Governor Jane Swift, another Republican, winning her endorsement, and somehow I can't find a single citation of Romney bashing
In part 2, we'll examine more of Gibbs' standard script and compare/contrast Obama's rhetoric and record.
Roger Philon/CATO Institute,
"Rational Basis Review Revisited": Thumbs UP!
I addressed this topic in my lead April 13 commentary on one of Barack Obama's favorite bogeymen, the Lochner era. I thus described the infamous Footnote 4 of Carolene Products (the federal government did not allow sale/shipment of its products across state lines, and the company sued on grounds of the violation of its economic liberty) in these terms: "This decision is wrong on so many levels it isn't funny: it basically repealed the concept of limited government." Roger Philon discusses the fact that Footnote 4 created an arbitrary distinction that some liberties (e.g., free speech) are more equal than others (e.g., economic liberty): that is, the Supreme Court would not scrutinize majoritarian infringements on economic liberty so long as there was some "rational basis" for the law: they aren't economists, so they're not going to get in the middle of these issues. (When I was in school, this was an example of what we would call a "cop-out".)
I LOVE Judge Janice Rogers Brown, one of the best appellate appointments George W. Bush ever made! Judge Brown had no choice but to concur based on precedent, but she had these choice words to say (be still, my beating heart...):
The Hettingas’ collision with the MREA—the latest iteration of the venerable AMAA—reveals an ugly truth: America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s.
First the Supreme Court allowed state and local jurisdictions to regulate property, pursuant to their police powers, in the public interest, and to “adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare.” Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, 516 (1934). Then the Court relegated economic liberty to a lower echelon of constitutional protection than personal or political liberty, according restrictions on property rights only minimal review. United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152–53 (1938). Finally, the Court abdicated its constitutional duty to protect economic rights completely, acknowledging that the only recourse for aggrieved property owners lies in the “democratic process.” Vance v. Bradley, 440 U.S. 93, 97 (1979). “The Constitution,” the Court said,“presumes that, absent some reason to infer antipathy, even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic process and that judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think a political branch has acted.”I think I've found the first person that I want President Romney to nominate for the next vacancy on SCOTUS....
Latest Nominations to the TSA Hall of Shame
From newsmax:
- "Agents labeled a 4-year-old girl a “terrorist threat” because she hugged her grandmother at a security checkpoint at the Wichita Airport in Kansas;"
- "Forced the family of a 7-year-old cerebral palsy victim to miss a flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport because they insisted on inspecting the girl’s crutches;"
- "Ordered a 95-year-old woman to remove her adult diaper during a search at North West Florida Airport;"
- "Threatened Rep. Quico Canseco of Texas with arrest after he complained he was being patted down so hard at San Antonio Airport that it hurt."
- Today President Obama made a surprise visit to Kabul, Afghanistan. What the press did not cover was his earlier secret stop in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where his helicopter touched down in the newly created football field end zone on the site of the former mansion. Obama earlier this week recounted his harrowing moments during the Abbottabad raid with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), whom mentioned that it had reminded him of his own Vietnam War experiences.
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| President Obama posing before spiking the football at the site of the UBL mansion in Abbottabad. Courtesy of Bluegrass Pundit |
