Heck of a promise there, Mitt ol' boy

[thewayne]

"What I can promise you is this -- when you get out of college, if I'm president you'll have a job. If President Obama is reelected, you will not be able to get a job."
— Mitt Romney to a New Hampshire college student

The problem is fairly simple. The best way to grow an economy and add jobs is increased manufacturing, and we don't do that very much any more. We have a jobless recovery: employers found that they could do as much or more with fewer staff, and now they have little incentive to add positions if there's no direct promise of increased sales/profit.

Comments

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

One of the things nobody's saying is that the economy has changed in a fundamental way.

We had something like this before, when farm machinery took away the jobs that gave 90% of us our livelihoods. At that same time, factory jobs opened up in the cities. So we, and the various other now-industrialized nations, changed from rural handcraft economies to urban mass production economies. To survive you needed to know your "reading, writing, and Route 23, to the North and the jobs up in the Northern factories," as I think the song goes, but if you were willing to pull up stakes there was still something available.

Today, US factory workers are the most productive in the world. But as with the farmers, few of whom spend all day moving along behind the south end of a northbound mule any more, these factory workers are more and more highly educated, highly trained technicians sitting in air conditioned control booths, or repair craftsmen who step in when the robots break down. There ain't that many jobs left pushing carts of milk cartons around. Those such jobs that do still exist tend to get shuffled off to child slave labor in Malaysia because the bean counters on Wall Street know you can make 1/8 of one cent more profit per shoe there than you could making them in the USA.

We COULD use vastly increased production per worker to provide good livings to more workers with fewer hours. If that sounds radical, well, that's where your 8 hour day and your weekend (back when we had 8 hour days and weekends without work) came from. Instead you just work the few workers to death with overtime, send millions and billions of dollars to our wealthy masters, and leave everyone else out of work.

So when we have 10% of us producing all the food, because food production is so mechanized and automated, and we're heading toward 10% of us providing all the manufactured goods, because that is getting so mechanized and automated, what do you do with the remaining 80% of the people? Start a Soylent Green factory?

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

Eh, I see it as a promise he'll never have to keep. Let's face it, this whole process is just all leading to who exactly is going to loose to Obama in November.

[silveradept]

Rhetoric. No points for you, Mr. Romney, unless you have a very specific plan that backs that assertion.