By Herman Cain
June 18, 2011
Writer Ari Berman of the left-wing magazine The Nation wrote last week
that if jobs are the issue that decides the election, Barack Obama
should be the winner.
Huh?
OK, it’s The Nation. You weren’t expecting rational analysis, were you?
But the piece is worth reading for what it reveals about left-wing
thought on how you create jobs. Berman actually tries to make the
argument that Obama has a plan to create jobs and Mitt Romney doesn’t.
Here’s where you can read it: http://www.thenation.com/blog/168340/obama-has-jobs-plan-romney-doesn't.
So how does Berman come to this conclusion? Essentially, he views
job-creation through a narrow left-wing lens that recognizes only one
method of creating jobs, which is for the government to bankroll new
hires. If the federal government is going to lay out hundreds of
billions that can be used to hire teachers, cops, firefighters,
construction workers and so forth, that counts as a plan to create jobs.
If, on the other hand, your plan is to boost economic growth so the
private-sector employment picture will improve – as is the case with
Mitt Romney – that is not a job-creation plan. What is it? Berman quotes
David Madland of the liberal Center for American Progress: “It is a
plan from the Republican candidate for president designed to maximize
corporate profits. What it doesn’t do is help the middle class or create
jobs.”
Got that? Maximizing corporate profits is inconsistent with job-creation
in the bizarro economic world of The Nation and the Center for American
Progress. Vote for Barack Obama! He’ll make corporations less
profitable (mission accomplished) and create lots of jobs as a result
(any day now).
But wait, you say, Berman tells us that “even the conservative editorial
page of the Wall Street Journal” criticized Romney’s plan. It’s very
popular these days for Obama’s apologists to claim WSJ editors have
defended him. They made the claim with respect to Obama’s spending, only
to be debunked by just about every media outlet in the nation,
including the WSJ itself. But what did the Journal really say about
Romney’s job-creation plan in the editorial, published way back in September, and cited by Berman? It said the following:
“The rollout is billed as Mr. Romney's ‘plan for jobs and economic
growth,’ and it rightly points out that to create more jobs requires
above all faster growth. This may seem like common sense, but it's a
notable break from the Obama Administration's penchant for policies that
‘target’ jobs rather than improving overall incentives for job
creation. So we have had policies for ‘green jobs,’ or construction
jobs, or teaching jobs, or automobile jobs, or temporary, targeted tax
cuts for jobs—even as the economy struggles.
“Mr. Romney seems to understand that the private economy will inevitably
produce millions of new jobs—in industries and companies we can't
predict—when it resumes growing at 3% or more. This is an important
philosophical distinction that drives most of the Romney agenda.”
Where the editorial criticized Romney’s plan, it was because they wanted
it to be more aggressive and specific about tax cuts – not exactly what
Mr. Berman is getting at, is it?
The reason Ari Berman, readers of The Nation and other Obama supporters
fail to see a job-creation plan is that they don’t understand how jobs
are created. To them, jobs are created when a politician sends a certain
amount of money to favored constituencies with the expectation that it
will be used to hire people to do work the politician wants done.
Another way they think jobs are created is for the federal government to
run 47 “job training” programs – as if companies can’t train their own
workers, and as if jobs are plentiful if only people go through a
government program first.
If Obama’s job-creation strategy worked, then it would already be
working. Instead, unemployment has soared during his presidency, and
job-creation has now slowed to a near-standstill. Obama complains that
this is because the Republican Congress won’t let him spend even more
stimulus money. But the real reason is that economic growth remains at
or below a paltry 2 percent, which is bad under any circumstance, but is
horrible as part of a so-called “recovery” from a recession.
Mitt Romney understands that a robust private sector is the best job
creator, which is why he proposes cutting the corporate tax rate,
slashing regulations, repealing ObamaCare and ending the explosion of
federal debt. If that doesn’t look like a job-creation plan to Ari
Berman and other Obama supporters, it’s because they – unlike Mitt
Romney – have never been involved in the creation of jobs and don’t know
how it works.
Much like their leader.
