Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Mitt Romney's Real Record in Massachusetts

With the recent discouraging jobs numbers the Romney campaign - or fiction writers if one is honest - are seeking to market their boss as a wonderful "job creator" during his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts.  In truth, that isn't how thinks really came down, but then, like its Christianist puppeteers, the GOP in general and Romney's camp in particular isn't very good when it comes to truth and veracity.  The truth becomes whatever they want it to be and objective facts be damned.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the real Romney record in Massachusetts and it's not pretty.  In fact, it's down right frightening.  Worse yet, Romney wants to now take his failed approach nationwide.  Here are some story excerpts:

Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign whipped out a new number over the weekend to dispute federal government data that ranked Massachusetts 47th in job creation during Romney’s time as governor there. Three campaign surrogates used the Sunday morning news circuit to claim that the state was actually 30th in job growth in Romney’s final year in office.

Of course, moving the state to 30th would still mean it was in the bottom half of the nation, a fact that would seem to fit assertions from local experts that the state’s economy was “below average and often near the bottom” while Romney was governor. Here are five facts about the Massachusetts economy from Romney’s 2003-2007 tenure:

1. Ranked 47th in job growth: Despite Romney’s professed expertise in creating jobs, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth during his time as governor. The state’s total job growth was just 0.9 percent, well behind other high-wage, high-skill economies in New York (2.7), California (4.7), and North Carolina (7.6). The national average, meanwhile, was better than 5 percent. 

2. Suffered the second-largest labor force decline in the nation: Only Louisiana, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saw a bigger decline in its labor force than Massachusetts during Romney’s tenure as governor. The US Census Bureau estimated that between July 2002 and July 2006, 222,000 more residents left Massachusetts for other states than came to it.

3. Lost 14 percent of its manufacturing jobs: Massachusetts lost 14 percent of its manufacturing jobs during Romney’s time in office, according to [Northeastern University economics professor Andrew] Sum. The loss was double the rate that the nation as a whole lost manufacturing jobs. In 2004, Romney vetoed legislation that would have banned companies doing business with the state from outsourcing jobs to other countries.

4. Experienced “below average” economic growth and was “often near the bottom”: “There was not one measure where the state did well under his term in office.  .  .  .  the state was more comparable to Rust Belt states like Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio than it was to other high-tech economies it typically competes with.

 5. Piled on more debt than any other state: Romney left Massachusetts residents with $10,504 in per capita bond debt, the highest of any state in the nation when he left office in 2007. The state ranked second in debt as a percentage of personal income.

Very inconvenient facts, but facts nonetheless.  Hence why the image at the top of this post seems all too appropriate.

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