Wednesday night on PoliticsNation, former White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein offered a scathing and succinct indictment of Mitt Romney’s alleged job creation bona fides.
“If you just look at the supply side, trickle down, de-regulatory stuff, that are in his policy documents— he doesn’t hide this stuff. It’s exactly the policy set that got us into the mess we’re in now, where unemployment’s been stuck at highly elevated levels,” Bernstein said.
Given Romney’s frame for understanding the economy— borrowing big to buy companies, slashing jobs, and selling them off— that’s not surprising. “If your model of the economy is trickle-down, that means you’re all about the kind of PE, profit-maximizing model, where tax cuts, and big gains to those at the top, are supposed to create more economic activity,” Bernstein added.
Romney’s confidence in his record at Bain Capital, where he claims to have created over 150,000 jobs, conveys a business acumen that plays well on the campaign trail. For Democrats, making ordinary Americans understand that Romney is proposing the same policies that got us into this mess (as Bernstein explained a week ago) will be essential.
