Jobs, Jobs, Jobs?

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“Is the president responsible for laying-off the people at Solyndra?” asked Chris Wallace of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Fox News Sunday.

“No,” replied Schultz, “because the president wasn’t the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of Solyndra.”

Wallace interrupted, “The president was a venture capitalist. He put taxpayer money into Solyndra and 1,000 people lost their jobs. So, is the president responsible for the thousand people that lost their jobs at Solyndra?”

“Not even close,” insisted Shultz, “He [Romney] was the CEO of Bain. Bain bought these companies and took them over, that he dismantled ….”

Wallace interrupted yet again, “But the president is the CEO of the country. So, you’re saying that the president has no responsibility for what happened at Solyndra?”

Shultz was getting flustered, “The president has responsibility for the green jobs program where he made investments …”

“And how about the company Solyndra that went bankrupt?” Wallace asked.

“The decisions, made at Solyndra that ultimately led to their bankruptcy, were those of the people who worked at Solyndra,” said Shultz.

The sad fact is that both talking heads are correct. Both Obama and Romney have less than stellar records on the job-creation front.

Obama believes he has all the information necessary to push the economy in a new direction. That direction requires government “investment” and subsidies in order to survive. During his tenure at Bain Capital, Romney recognized the inefficiencies in the U.S. economy brought on by high taxes, over regulation and corporate mismanagement. He raided vulnerable companies, tore them into pieces and sold them off at a profit.

Obama destroys jobs by diverting vast amounts of capital from the free market to invest in political projects masquerading as innovative, new “industries” – and private sector jobs are never created. While at Bain, Romney saw a business opportunity in picking over the bones of a dying American economy, becoming its scrap metal dealer –and U.S. companies shut their doors and jobs were lost or sent overseas. Both are two aspects of the same business model – America’s managed decline.

“I’m being hit twice: As a taxpayer, $500 million, where did it go?” asked Peter Kohlstadt, a research engineer for Solyndra, of the Washington Post, I’m hit a second time: I’m not getting money that is owed to me and the government hasn’t done anything to look out for us.”

“Romney cost me lots of sleepless nights and lots and lots of money,” Ed Stranger, a steelworker for a mill that went bankrupt under Bain Capital’s mismanagement, told the Reuters News Service. Reuters also recounts that under Bain, “Paperwork proliferated. Cost-cutting efforts backfired. Managers skimped on purchases of everything from earplugs to spare motors and scaled back routine maintenance. Machines began to break down more often, and with parts no longer in stock a replacement could take days to arrive.” One plant manager “didn't realize that a furnace needed a full eight hours to heat up to operating temperature.”

This, establishment Republicans tell us, is the job creating “business experience” America so desperately needs.

The choice our two parties are offering is startling: vote for Obama and he’ll “invest” your tax dollars away from our dying economy and into the bankrupt pipe dreams of the global-warming crowd; vote for Mitt Romney and he’ll help liquidate the rusting industrial assets of America’s economic past. Our first choice is to be thrown down a flight of stairs. Our second choice is to be escorted politely – but firmly – to the ground-floor exit by a pair of sturdy security guards. Either way, you end up on the street.

Today, the federal government announced that the nation’s debt stands at $15.23 trillion, roughly the equivalent of all goods and services produced in America in one year. That means our economy will have to grow by 6% each year just to maintain today’s less than rosy status quo.

Obama contends he can rebuild the battered home of our economy if we stopped being so lazy. Romney says he can mitigate the impending disaster if we just let him sell all the furniture.

That’s quite a choice offered by our fabulous two-party system.