Romney’s Rationale for Candidacy Unravels Over Bogus Jobs Claims, Record in Public and Private Sectors.

By DNC Press

From: Brad Woodhouse, DNC

To: Sunday Show Producers

Date: January 7, 2012

RE: Romney’s Rationale for Candidacy Unravels Over Bogus Jobs Claims, Record in Public and Private Sectors

From day one, we’ve heard Mitt Romney say that the basis of his campaign for president is that he has the business experience and economic know-how to create jobs and improve our nation’s economy. With that in mind, it’s only fair that the American people get a chance to take a closer look at his record.

Upon doing so, they’ll find a number of misleading statements by Romney: his false claim this week that he was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital and that he had a strong job creation record as Massachusetts Governor, the notion that he’s interested in helping working and middle-class families, and his dishonest attacks on the President’s economic record. And when those claims are held to even the most basic level of scrutiny, Mitt Romney’s rationale for his candidacy simply doesn’t hold up.

ROMNEY MISLEADS ON HIS OWN JOB CREATION RECORD

During an interview with “Fox and Friends” with FOX News on January 3 this week, Mitt Romney said: “And I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs. By the way, we created more jobs in Massachusetts than this president’s created in the entire country. So if the President wants to talk about jobs, and I hope he does, we’ll be comparing my record with his record and he comes up very, very short.”

While Romney boasts about the jobs he created as Governor of Massachusetts, the reality is that those were mostly government jobs. In fact, despite Romney’s near-constant references to his private sector business experience, for every one private sector job that was created in Massachusetts, there were 6 government jobs created. Under Romney’s leadership, the state actually ranked 47th out of 50 in job creation, badly trailing the rest of the country with manufacturing jobs falling by more than double the national average.

With regard to Romney’s claim that that during his tenure as the head of Bain Capital, he created over 100,000 new jobs, a fact-check conducted this week by the Washington Post found that Romney’s story just doesn’t add up. First of all, by the admission of Romney’s own spokesperson, while this figure stems from the sum of job gains at three companies that Romney “helped to start or grow” – Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s – it is based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain. In other words, Mitt Romney is trying to bolster his own economic credentials by talking about jobs he wasn’t even there to create.

What’s more, in 1994, following his claim that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain, Romney even backed away from that statement – acknowledging in an interview with the Boston Globe that there was no way to determine whether jobs had been lost or gained economy-wide on account of his ventures at Bain. Now Mitt Romney wants to argue he was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs?

The other problem with Romney’s math is that it does not factor in for the thousands of workers Bain laid off under his leadership, not to mention the American jobs he outsourced. Let’s remember that as the head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney made any number of profit-based business decisions that led to firing thousands of workers, closing plants, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas.

That includes companies like GS Technologies, which was profiled this week in a Reuters story. GS Technologies was a steel mill in Kansas City that was acquired by Bain Capital, leading to the layoffs of roughly 750 workers. Thanks to Mitt Romney and his business partners, the employees at GS Technologies lost severance pay and health insurance that had been promised to them, and their pension benefits were slashed. A federal government insurance agency had to swoop in and bail out the company’s pension plan – all while Bain raked in millions of dollars in profits.

But apparently when it comes to this fantasy figure of 100,000 jobs, Mitt Romney wasn’t about to let the facts get in the way.

ROMNEY’S TAX PLAN HURTS MIDDLE CLASS AND WORKING FAMILIES BUT GIVES A HEFTY TAX CUT TO THE WEALTHIEST FEW

Mitt Romney likes to say that his tax plan is written for middle-class families. “The wealthy are doing just fine,” he recently told Chris Wallace at FOX News. “The people that have been hurt are the people in the middle class so I focus those precious dollars that we have, I focus that on the middle class.”

The truth is that Romney’s tax plan would actually increase the federal budget deficit and give more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans while providing little or no relief to the middle class and those still working to get there.

Under Romney’s plan, people making more than $1 million would get an average tax cut of $146,000, while many middle class and working families would actually see their taxes increase. This plan is just the latest example of how phenomenally out of touch Mitt Romney really is. Whether he is betting $10,000 without batting an eye, calling a $1,000 payroll tax cut a “little Band-Aid,” or advocating for a plan that gives more tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires while working families foot the bill, Mitt Romney just doesn’t seem to get it.

CONCLUSION

With such deeply misguided policies and a distinct history of sending hardworking Americans to the unemployment line, you’d think that Mitt Romney would be hesitant to throw punches at the President on economic grounds. But that’s exactly what Romney has tried to do. So while Romney continues to launch misguided attacks on President Obama, we’ll let the numbers do the talking: under the President’s leadership, we have now seen 22 straight months of private sector job growth. We have also increased manufacturing job growth for the second straight year – prior to the Obama Administration, the last year the country saw manufacturing job growth was 1997. Those are numbers Mitt Romney would have loved to see when he was Massachusetts Governor and manufacturing jobs plummeted in his state.

When push comes to shove, Romney’s story just doesn’t hold up. His job-creation claims are factually inaccurate, and his plan to double down on the same failed policies that caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is enough to send America’s working families running in the other direction. The American people deserve to know the truth – and as we continue to see, Mitt Romney is terrified to give it to them.