Paul Krugman: Romney on Jobs

Greg Sargent has been demanding that Mitt Romney be held accountable for two claims that he makes about jobs: (1) That Obama has been a job-destroyer (2) that he, Romney, created 100,000 jobs at Bain.

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So if something good happens, even if it’s long after Romney was at Bain, it’s Romney’s achievement. If something bad happens, even if it’s in a company that Bain took over when Romney was there, never mind. By that standard, everyone who’s spent a lot of time with slot machines is a big winner, since only the pluses count.

Meanwhile, on the Obama jobs front, I’ve provided the following figure:



So Romney wants to count all those losses in the early months of the Obama administration, before any of the new president’s policies had gone into effect, as belonging to Obama — as opposed to being something related to the economy in free fall that Obama inherited.

But there’s something else I forgot to mention. During the Bush years there was a constant drumbeat of boasting about all the jobs Bush had created. Created since when? The answer, always, was since June 2003 — the low point of the decade. Implicitly, Bush disavowed responsibility for the first two and a half years of his time in office.

One more interesting fact: even if you only count the good times, between June 2003 and the coming of the Great Recession, the economy was creating only 148,000 jobs a month. That seems relevant, since Romney’s economic policy is basically a return to Bushism. Job growth at a similar rate now would bring us back to full employment sometime in the 2020s.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/romney-on-jobs/