Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has frequently derided President Obama for not creating enough jobs in America. However, it should be noted that from February 2001, George W. Bush’s first full month in office, through January 2009, his last, the economy added 1 million jobs. By contrast, in 2010 alone, the economy added at least 1.1 million jobs; from 2011 to the present, the economy added about 3 million more jobs, and the unemployment rate is now significantly lower than it was when Obama became president.
Romney also incessantly says that his background in private sector business (as president of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that invests in companies in order to sell them later at a profit) gives him the knowledge of how to create jobs and drive economic growth that he presumes President Obama does not have. Although he is running for President, which is a government, public sector job, Romney never refers to his time in another government job, as governor of Massachusetts, when he talks about what he learned about creating jobs and driving economic growth.
Maybe this is because when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, the state ranked 47 out of 50 in job creation. Maybe he does not want to talk about his job creation record in Massachusetts because it is rather dismal.
In addition to this, one of Romney’s ideas to drive employment and job retraining is to bring back a Bush administration program called Personal Re-Employment Accounts. Unfortunately, that program achieved results that can be described best as “mixed.” According to reporting by NPR, in 2004, the Bush administration conducted an experiment to begin privatizing a small part of the federal retraining program. The program was not extended after the experiment ended, because it did not achieve the results desired.
Romney has not said how he would change the program to improve its effectiveness, only that he would bring it back. Why would Romney want to bring back a program that was stopped because it was so unsuccessful?
Clearly, as an investor, Romney has made a lot of money. Good for him! However, the job of US President is different than the job that Romney talks so much about (leader of a PEG). The skills required to be a good investor or good manager of a PEG are different than the skills required to be a good US President, or frankly, the president of any nation.
The US President is not the “Investor in Chief.” Why doesn’t Romney talk about his record of achievement in job creation and econonomic development as governor of Massachusetts, a job that more closely resembles that of the US President? Maybe it’s because his record as governor of Massachusetts doesn’t contain much that would persuade people to vote for him to be president of the United States.