"Romney’s ‘Jobs Plan’ Gets Hammered by Economists" By MERRILL GOOZNER, The Fiscal Times

Romney’s ‘Jobs Plan’ Gets Hammered by Economists

By MERRILL GOOZNER, The Fiscal Times

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/06/11/Romneys-Jobs-Plan-Gets-Hammered-by-Economists.aspx#page1

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The rating firm’s survey of the 1,100 non-financial companies it follows also found that they were sitting on cash hordes in excess of $1.24 trillion last December. Apple alone was sitting on nearly $100 billion. The entire corporate sector had over $2 trillion in cash. Alas, robust hiring has not followed in the wake of surging profits. “Giving more tax breaks to corporations that are awash in cash is not going to lead to anything,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University after serving as President Clinton’s chief economic adviser and top economist at the World Bank. “It’s a lack of demand that’s really impeding investment.”

Stiglitz is among the growing number of economists and business leaders who believe that lagging income, whether for people who already have jobs or those who are still un- or under-employed, has become the central problem facing the U.S. economy. Stagnant income explains why the rebound has failed to become self-sustaining, they say.

Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers last week painted a clear portrait of the policy initiative the Republican presidential hopeful plans to use to restore robust growth to the U.S. economy. In a phrase: more tax breaks for business.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, and Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University business professor and top economic adviser to the Romney campaign, said the former Massachusetts governor, if elected, would enact the same policies as those enacted by President Ronald Reagan shortly after he took office in 1981. “Particularly powerful are (Romney’s) proposals to reduce marginal tax rates on business income earned by corporate and unincorporated businesses alike,” the two advisers wrote. “His goal, like Reagan’s, is to make it profitable to invest in job creation.”

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