Regarding Romney's Claim that the Stimulus Didn't Create Jobs
Romney's notion that the government stimulus didn't create any jobs, said many times and repeated in the debate Tuesday night, is of course absurd. Throw economics out the window. Erase the New Deal from the history books. Erase the 2.5 million or so jobs created by the stimulus.
It's not just crazy on the merits, but it does long term damage when a candidate gets to keep repeating this over and over, sticking it further into people's minds. It helps erase the notion that government is good.
Except, it wasn't just Romney who said at Tuesday night's debate that government doesn't create jobs. It was also President Obama:
"I think a lot of this campaign, maybe over the last four years, has been devoted to this notion that I think government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer. That's not what I believe."
1 Comments:
It's one of those things that has many meanings. It could mean (and this is how I interpreted it when Obama said it last night) simply that the number of federal government jobs is relatively stable, and it's not like the government is hiring enough people to lower the national unemployment rate. At the other end of the spectrum, it could mean that the government has nothing at all to do with job creation.
Both candidates fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum (otherwise it wouldn't make sense to blame Obama for slow job growth at all). But of course, it's when Obama starts to clarify details that he looks the worst in debates, and he's not trying to reach the people who do think that the government should create jobs - he already has their vote.
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