Meet the New Republican Plan to Create Jobs - George W. Bush, Recycled

[axehead]

Falling behind in the polls - Mitt Romney is expected to lay out his plan for job creation today at an event in Nevada. And like all the other plans put forward by his colleagues on the right - Romney's job creation plan sounds more like a Christmas list for millionaires, billionaires and transnational corporations, and less like an effective way to get Americans back to work.


The plan is complete with massive tax breaks for US-based corporations - which already pay the second lowest taxes as a percent of GDP in the entire developed world - and are today sitting on more than two trillion dollars in cash and not hiring anyone. Romney will also call for the elimination of the Capital Gains tax so that trust-fund babies like Paris Hilton and Wall Street speculators can get a free ride in American while just sitting on their butts by the pool collecting dividend checks. And of course - Romney will take aim at bringing down those pesky federal regulations that make sure the air we breathe, food we eat, and water we drink are safe. That's also what House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said are the priorities of House Republicans, as Members of Congress head back to Washington, DC and Republicans begin their assault on the EPA.


So, meet the new Republican plan to create jobs - George W. Bush, recycled.


-Thom

[axehead]

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/06/romneys-economists-brains-but-also-controversy/

In choosing R. Glenn Hubbard and N. Gregory Mankiw as his top economic advisers, Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney has tapped unquestionable brains in the field of conservative economics, two men with Ivy League pedigrees and extensive CVs.


Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the American Principles Project Palmetto Freedom Forum Monday, Sept. 5, 2011, in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/ Mary Ann Chastain)He’s also courting controversy from the early years of the George W. Bush White House.

The Romney campaign announced the appointment of Mr. Hubbard, the dean of Columbia University’s business school, and Mr. Mankiw, a Harvard University economist, as two top economic advisers, along with former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent and former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, ahead of an economic address the former Massachusetts governor is to deliver this afternoon in North Las Vegas.

Mr. Hubbard served as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers in the first two years of the Bush White House. From that post, he exercised an unusual amount of power, taking advantage of the feuding between National Economic Council Director Larry Lindsey and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to emerge as the chief architect of early Bush economic policies. The president’s 2003 tax cut was largely Mr. Hubbard’s design; it featured deep cuts to the taxation of dividends and capital gains along with the acceleration of income tax cuts.

But that tax cut plan had divided the Bush White House, with Mr. O’Neill arguing fiercely that the surpluses Mr. Bush inherited were already turning into deficits and the nation could not afford more. The argument elicited the famous quote by then-Vice President Dick Cheney that deficits did not matter, according to Mr. O’Neill. In the Academy Award-winning documentary “Inside Job,” which chronicled the 2008 financial collapse, Mr. Hubbard was made to look foolish by filmmakers who portrayed him as carrying the water for Wall Street barons in the halls of academia.

Mr. Mankiw, through his economic text books and well-read economic blog, maintains a reputation as one of the nation’s leading economists. But his time as chairman if Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — just after Mr. Hubbard’s departure — also had its share of controversies. At a 2004 press conference, he said the “outsourcing” of jobs abroad was “Probably a plus for the economy in the long run,” expressing the views of many economists at the time that the globalization of labor markets would make all economies more efficient. The remark won him a rebuke by Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the House, and he backed off it.

Mr. Mankiw’s CEA also appeared to minimize the distinction between low-wage service jobs and disappearing manufacturing work when its Economic Report of the President in 2004 asked, “When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, is it providing a service or combining inputs to manufacture a product?”

Such comments, while defensible on economic grounds, could become fodder for politics in a struggling economy where deficits, jobs and manufacturing in particular are central issues of the 2012 campaign.