Mitt Romney’s ‘Jobs Plan’ is a Total Bust
This morning, the Washington Post’s in-house fact checker tore Mitt Romney’s claim that he will create 12 MILLION jobs to shreds. The Post wrote that the “‘new math'” in Romney’s plan “doesn’t add up. In awarding the claim four pinocchios — the most untrue possible rating, the Post expressed incredulity at the fact Romney would personally stand behind such a flawed, baseless claim:
Clearly, some clever campaign staffer thought it would be nice to match up poll-tested themes such as “energy independence,” “tax reform” and “cracking down on China” with actual job numbers. We just find it puzzling that Romney agreed to personally utter these words without asking more questions about the math behind them.
Ezra Klein, also of the Washington Post, called Romney’s claims and his campaign’s defense of them “LOL-worthy.” Klein looked at Romney’s laughable jobs claims (which Romney claims would be accomplished in one four-year term) and found that they were as follows:
So Romney’s claim of 12 million jobs over four years breaks down to 7 million jobs over 10 years in an economy that’s already at full employment, 3 million jobs over eight years that have nothing to do with any of Romney’s policies, and 2 million jobs if China suddenly became very, very respectful of U.S. intellectual property laws.
In other words, the claims behind Romney’s so-called jobs plan are unrelated to what Mitt Romney is actually proposing, are reflective of policies Obama has already put in place, and are stretched out over periods longer than a single term.
Our colleagues at the Center for American Progress Action Fund also took a look at Romney’s economic proposals and concluded that there are basically three possible outcomes for the economy if they were to be implemented:
- A serious economic slowdown and paltry job growth
- Significant job losses
- Huge job losses and a new recession
All of these outcomes would obviously take us backward and should be unacceptable in general, much less as the central policy proposal of someone running for president.
And how do we know for sure that Romney’s plan won’t work? We’ve tried it before and it failed — repeatedly.
Check out the full analysis for more on Romney’s job-free jobs plan.
BOTTOM LINE: Instead of putting forward a real jobs plan, Mitt Romney just wants more of the same failed economic policies that reward the rich at the expense of everyone else and got our economy into this mess in the first place.
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