Wednesday, May 30, 2012

What we need to do to fix the economy is put more people out of work


Mitt Romney makes perfect economic sense for America:
"That stimulus he [Obama] put in place, it didn't help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs, and the one place we should have cut back was on government jobs. We have a 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let's send them home and put you back to work!"
Thing is, none of that is true. 
Mitt Romney's 145,000 claim isn't accurate, but even if it were, it's amazing that Romney believes firing tens of thousands of Americans would be good for the economy. The way Romney puts it, firing public sector workers would create jobs in the private sector, but that's nonsense. The economy isn't zero-sum game: You don't need to fire someone to create a job. In fact, every time someone loses their job, no matter whether they are in the private or public sector, the economy as a whole takes a hit.
But Romney's crazy economic theory is not even grounded in reality—under Obama, public sector employment has dropped, while private sector employment has grown. Obama signed the stimulus in February of 2009. Since then, public sector employment has dropped by 608,000.Private sector employment, meanwhile, has increased by 760,000. Even if you just look at federal employment (which is but a small fraction of the overall public sector workforce), only 26,000 jobs have been added, a slower pace of growth than in the private sector.  Link
Recently I had a couple of friends tell me that Mitt's economic expertise is significant and valuable.  Too bad he seems to actually have no economic expertise.

For example, when he was governor of Massachusetts, its economic growth was 47th out of the 50 states.  Yeah, Mitt is an economic genius.

No comments: