Normally, I wouldn’t do a book review for something like Mitt Romney’s “Believing in America,” but I think it’s very important reading because Romney is a clear front-runner in the GOP primaries. Also, it’s about 160 pages, so it qualifies as a book. And you can get it on Kindle for free (I think). I just got the PDF because I don’t have a Kindle since I’m one of those paper-and-ink types for longer reading. I spent a few weeks on this post and it’s a long one, so get comfortable.
The piece is laid out very sensibly. It starts with the forward by an economics professor and an introductory letter from Romney himself. This is the typical starting fluff stuff, so I’m not going to say much more about it. After that, he provides a list of five bills and five executive orders for his first day in office. These are all on two pages and very quick to read, so I’ll be brief on them and my comments.
The five bills include reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%, the implementation of free trade agreements (Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, which have been sitting on Obama’s desk for a couple years), an energy bill to get exploration going, consolidation of federal retraining programs and funding for state-level programs, and an immediate 5% ($20B per year) cut in non-security discretionary spending (no Medicare or Social Security, which means this is really just nibbling around the edges and not attacking the real problems).
The five orders include an order to try to kill Obamacare (this may be moot by the 2012 election depending on if/when the Supreme Court takes it up, but if repeal is his goal, he should also introduce a bill to repeal Obamacare because an executive order can’t permanently kill Obamacare – only repeal or the Supreme Court declaring the whole law unconstitutional can), a rollback of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or jobs and a cap on new ones, more streamlining of domestic energy production, unfair trade practice sanctions on China (it may not be the smartest idea to needlessly provoke China), and a reversal of Obama-era orders that favor organized labor.
Romney then details how this recession is by far the worst since the Great Depression, noting unemployment rates, the average duration of unemployment, and several other statistics showing just how bad things really are right now. Next, he goes on to highlight some of Obama’s specific policy failures, such as the stimulus bill, with specific emphasis on the lack of promised green jobs and the failure of the infrastructure spending to jumpstart the economy (a topic I’ve discussed recently myself). From there, he pressed on regarding what he called distractions, such as the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and Obamacare. Romney also provides an excerpt from an exchange between Congress and the EPA showing that the EPA doesn’t consider economic impacts in their regulations and he also mentioned several other suffocating regulations. He closed this section with a jab about the downgrade. As an avid critic of Obama myself, there really wasn’t that much new here and it very effectively builds the case for why you should vote against Obama.
Now, the new stuff begins. This is the section where Romney shows you why you should vote for him. He talks about his broad array of experience in both the private and public sectors, from his educational background to his time with the Bain firms to his leadership of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics to his time as governor of Massachusetts. It even talks about his family, married over 40 years with five kids and 16 grandchildren. After this, he goes into detail about the seven areas he wants to focus on – taxes, regulations, trade, energy, labor, human capital, and fiscal policies.
Here’s one side note before I continue. Critics of Romney are quick to point out that Bill Clinton put a similar package together for the 1992 election and that the package then was weak and not worth reading, so Romney’s will be the same. I’ll be the judge of that by reading Romney’s plan, thank you very much. I never read the Clinton one (I was in elementary school then and we had simpler, more exciting reading to do).
On tax policy, Romney first provides a brief list of Obama’s failures in this matter and then advocates several ideas of his own, such as the extension of the Bush tax rates, the abolition of dividend, interest, and capital gain taxes on taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes under $200,000 per year (I particularly like this idea), the elimination of the death tax, a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%, and a transition from a worldwide tax system to a territorial one (Romney explains that currently, companies pay corporate taxes in the country where they earn the income, then when they try to repatriate the money back into the US, the US taxes them at the difference between the US and the other country). There’s also an editorial from Scott McNealy, the founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, defending Romney’s position that corporations should be viewed as people for tax purposes (a position which the left not only disagrees with, but widely mocks as a gaffe).
The regulatory policy chapter takes a similar format as the tax policy. Romney puts a quote from his own speeches, discusses some of Obama’s shortcomings, lists some of his ideas, and it closes with an editorial, this time from Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.). Romney mentions that government regulation cost the economy $1.75 trillion in 2008 alone according the US Small Business Administration. He also calls for the repeal and replacement of both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, a review of Obama-era regulations, a regulatory cap (no new regulation, and if you want a new one, an old one has to go), a restoration of Congressional oversight including having Congress vote on big regulations that cost $100M or more (I won’t hold my breath – I’ve never heard of a White House do anything but take power from Congress), and a requirement to consider cost in regulating (cost-benefit analysis needs to happen in regulating and it doesn’t from what I can tell).
Trade policy follows the existing formula, too. There are two main areas of focus in this chapter. First, Romney rightly attacks Obama for allowing several basically completed trade agreements (Colombia, Panama, and South Korea) to languish incomplete for his entire presidency and for generally not making trade policy a priority. Romney, of course, pledges the opposite. He would get the pending agreements passed, work to engage in new negotiations with other countries, and create what he calls a ‘Reagan economic zone’ to place the top trade policy problems faced by America into center focus. The second area of focus in this chapter is specifically on US trade policy with China. Romney correctly criticizes Obama for basically being spineless in dealing with China and for Obama’s apparent view that America is working from a position of weakness, so we have to let China do whatever they want. I like Romney’s attitude to get tougher on China and most of his suggestions on doing so, but the one area I disagree with him on is the currency issue. I think we actually want China to have a weaker currency because it will keep our prices down.
And we move onto energy policy. Romney criticizes Obama for both his clear opposition to American oil and coal for energy and his support for green energy. He also attacks Obama for imposing job-killing environmental regulations during a time of 9% unemployment. There are two fundamental premises to Romney’s approach to energy policy, which are the same two fundamental premises of my own approach to energy policy. One, we can combine energy policy and national security policy by developing our own energy reserves. Two, we need to more equally weight economic and environmental considerations in policy.
He wants to overhaul the regulatory system for energy policy, and Romney spends a bit of time on nuclear power trying to streamline their process and expand their capabilities. It’s great that he’s talking about nuclear regulation in this level of detail, but by focusing only on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), he’s missed the lion’s share of the problems with nuclear power regulation. The NRC has issues, don’t get me wrong, but to only focus on them misses so many other problems. Also, expecting the NRC to approve a reactor within only two years is unreasonable due to the complexity of the devices in question.
Romney also comes out clearly in support of the Keystone XL pipeline (which is a great idea because it would get us better access to Canada’s energy). What’s also interesting is his desire to overhaul the energy research funding process. He wants to see our energy research work more like our defense research. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the inspiration for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). I’ve worked with DARPA in the past and their model creates innovation and results, so I really like this idea.
We’re on to labor policy next. Here, Romney details Obama’s pro-union positions and actions, including Obama’s support of card check and snap elections, the auto industry bailouts, the use of Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) during the first stimulus bill, and the attacks by Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Boeing’s efforts to build a facility in South Carolina. Romney shows that he has a balanced view of unions. He recognizes their historical importance, but also recognizes that they cannot be allowed to run amok as they have under the Obama presidency. Romney fully supports Boeing’s position against the NLRB (a very sensible position on Romney’s part) and wants to see union elections be as honest as possible, which is the basis for his opposition of card check and snap elections. He also would use the bully pulpit of the presidency to advocate states become Right-to-Work states, but makes no mention of intent to introduce a national Right-to-Work bill, which is a good thing because that decision needs to reside with the state governments, not the federal government. Importantly, Romney would also outlaw the use of mandatory union dues for political purposes, under the premise that donations for political causes should be freely and voluntarily given.
Next is human capital. The use of the term ‘human capital’ is a telltale sign of a private sector background because it’s one of those business buzzwords. The piece in general screams private sector. Anyway, Romney mentions the structural unemployment problem and generally attacks Obama’s lack of productive action on the issue. Romney’s wants to reduce the redundancies in the federal programs and give the states more power in the matter. He also has a particularly interesting idea called ‘personal reemployment accounts’ in which unemployed people would be given a set amount of money to use for retraining purposes. Whether they enroll in government programs or college or trade school or whatever is up to them because, as Romney believes, “[A]n individual knows better than the government what avenue will lead most rapidly to a job.” Romney parlays this into examples of a couple apparently successful programs out of Georgia and Massachusetts before going into his plans to attract and retain foreign talent. He places a big focus here particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), which is paramount to our future. We simply do not produce enough STEM graduates as it is, so we need to encourage people with STEM backgrounds to come to the US and we need to encourage foreign STEM graduates to stay in the US. The importance of this issue is vastly underappreciated in our society, and reading this section makes me feel like Mitt Romney gets it.
We close out the policy series with fiscal policy. Here, Romney highlights the massive expansion of government spending under the Obama administration. He also attacks Obama’s call for a ‘balanced approach’ to fiscal reform because Romney believes we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Romney endorses the GOP’s Cut-Cap-Balance approach, advocating for a 20% of GDP cap on federal spending, an immediate 5% reduction in non-security discretionary spending, entitlement reform (being very clear to strike a balance between allowing the benefits of current and soon-to-be retirees to remain unchanged and making sure future retirees can still collect), and passage of the Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). Honestly, there’s not much here that’s not already in the typical GOP package on fiscal policy.
With that, we come to a section called, “A Stark Choice,” and the title says it all as Romney discusses the fact that there are now two competing visions of America’s future. This section is well-written and does a great job of portraying the 2012 election as pivotal for America’s future. There’s also an appendix of 59 policy proposals that will get America back to work. Romney mentioned pretty much all of these in the report already, but it’s nice to see the list all laid out on two pages.
If you’re on the fence about Mitt Romney, you should read this. He doesn’t get much into social issues here, so you’ll have to look elsewhere on that stuff. This is an economic plan. At the least, skim it and/or read the appendix. Should Romney win the GOP nomination, this document will be in the spotlight during the general election.
No comments:
Post a Comment