Mitt Romney’s 59 Point Plan is Now a Five Point Plan

A Shrinking Plan, Just Like Mr. Romney’s Shrinking Support in the Polls

Early in the campaign Mitt Romney introduced a 59 point plan that he said would be his blueprint for getting the U. S. economy going again.  Nobody paid any attention, because the attention span of both the public and the press is far less than 59 points.  So now Mr. Romney has dumbed down his plan to a five point plan.  Here from the LA Times is the new, new Romney program.  (Never let it be said that this Forum doesn’t provide full opportunity for the Romney campaign to present its views).

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Here are Romney’s five points, with quotations from his speeches in the last week: 

·                                 Achieve North American energy independence by increasing access to domestic fossil fuels, streamlining regulations and the permitting process, drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and approving the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada. "No. 1, we're going to take advantage of our energy, and that's going to create millions of jobs."

·                                 Improve education and job training, in part by increasing school choice and changing the way teachers are hired and evaluated. "We've got fix our schools.... It's time for us to put the kids and the parents and the teachers first, and the teachers union behind."

·                                 Curtail unfair trade practices, especially those of China. "I will call China a currency manipulator and stop them in their tracks from killing American jobs."

·                                 Cut the federal deficit by reducing federal spending below 20% of GDP. "You're not going to get entrepreneurs to go out and start an enterprise ... unless they realize we're not headed to Greece."

·                                 Champion small business by cutting taxes and regulations, and by overturning Obamacare. "We need small business to grow. ... Small businesses have been crushed these past four years." 

"If we do those five things I'm talking about, we're going to create about 12 million jobs in the next four years," he says.

Ok, let’s see what we have here.  First of all the increased drilling should mean more jobs, we agree.  Of course, those jobs are not coming for five to ten years, and will be very specialized.  But yes, there will be more jobs.

The program to radically change education is a little odd, since it is state and local governments that manage public education, and Conservatives really want the Federal government out of that business.  So it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Romney would do, maybe “No Child Left Behind Rel. 2.0”?  But better education would produce more jobs, in about a decade or decade and a half.

Calling China a “currency manipulator” sounds like fun, but the impact on jobs seems minimal.  Is American industry really going to make all those things we now import from China?  And how many Americans, including Mr. Romney, know what a “currency manipulator” is.  It sounds bad, though.

Cutting Federal spending will of course reduce rather than increase employment, something Mr. Romney himself acknowledged when he attacked cuts in defense spending as costing American jobs.  This impact will be immediate, so in the short term Mr. Romney’s plans will reduce employment not create more.

Cutting taxes on small business and cutting regulations sounds great, except Mr. Romney says his tax proposal are revenue neutral so whose taxes are going to go up if small business taxes go down.  And yes we don’t know what regulations Mr. Romney is talking about because he doesn’t know what regulations he is talking about.  As for repealing the health care reform act, Mr. Romney now says he wants to keep a lot of its provisions, so how this is going to help is a total mystery.

Okay, there you have it, Mitt Romney’s five point plan.  Anybody want a piece of that?