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Mitt Romney’s rivals this week intensified their attacks over business failures that happened on his watch at the investment firm Bain Capital.

Both the successes and the failures reveal the candidate’s faith in “creative destruction,” the notion that the new must relentlessly replace the old so that companies and the economy can become more efficient.

Romney’s approach is visible in the three big Bain investments he trumpets in his official biography as evidence that he knows how to create jobs. The companies — Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s Pizza — are well-known consumer brands, and the campaign has gone so far as to say that Romney helped create 100,000 jobs through his work related to those businesses.

But like Romney’s work on all the businesses Bain invested in, the primary goal with these companies wasn’t job creation but making them more profitable and valuable. This meant embracing aspects of capitalism that have unsettled some Americans: laying off workers, expanding overseas to chase profits and paying top executives significantly more than employees on lower rungs.
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The rise of Staples is in fact a textbook example of “creative destruction.”
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As Staples grew, smaller stationery stores were shuttered. These losses are not counted in Romney’s jobs figure.
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And as Staples has grown, so has the pay earned by its chief executive, from $4.7 million in 2006 to $10.8 million in 2010. The company explains in its annual report how it sets pay, saying that it uses comparable firms, such as Amazon, Best Buy and Starbucks, as benchmarks.

Staples does not disclose the wages of its 89,000 employees, nor does it break out how many work as retail associates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage of a retail salesperson in the United States is $25,000 a year.
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The Romney campaign says its candidate’s experiences at Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s give him “the unique skills and capabilities to do what President Obama has failed to do: focus on job creation and turn around our nation’s faltering economy.”

But some private-equity experts think the link between Bain’s deals and jobs is more tenuous.

“I’ve got a lot of admiration for Bain Capital, but jobs were the byproduct of the mission, not the product,” said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “The product was to increase wealth." http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/mitt-romney-bain-capita
l-and-the-gospel-of-creative-destruction/2012/01/09/gIQAfRKEsP_story_1.html to present the relevant points rather than the entire article.

That half-hour "infomercial" by Ron Paul's people about what Bain/Romney did to South Steel Company is a perfect example of them going in and saddling a company with debt, liquidating equipment, laying off employees, and raking in millions for themselves. Yeah, it's a political piece and all that entails, but that doesn't change the facts.

So the backoff has begun:

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The push-back was evident in the words of the state’s governor, Nikki Haley, a supporter of Romney who introduced him at a campaign rally in Columbia, S.C. last night.

“I am proud of all of our Republican candidates,” said Haley. “But we have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like dang Democrats against the free market. We believe in free markets.”

Turns out Haley was right on message.

Some of Romney’s Republican opponents may not be as willing as they were just a few days ago to continue their attacks.

The Note is hearing that Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Bain may be coming to an end. A GOP source says that Gingrich “got backlash from donors on Bain ads coming off as anti-capitalism.” Look for the former House Speaker’s team to pivot to other issues soon.

And Rick Perry, who accused companies like the one Romney ran of behaving like “vultures,” seems to be backing off too. As ABC’s Arlette Saenz notes, though Perry began his day by bashing Romney, at his last three events he completely wiped the rhetoric from his speeches. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/are-romneys-foes-backing-
off-bain-the-note/ keep from giggling; America is being educated about how "constructive destrucion" and equity traders REALLY work, and they've done a good portion of the Democrats' work for them. So I think they woke up, gave a big "whoops!" and are now trying to repair the damage (or at least put it where nobody notices anymore).

How about some REAL truths:

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America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Mr. Romney’s claims about the Obama job record aren’t literally false, but they are deeply misleading. Still, the real fun comes when we look at what Mr. Romney says about himself. Where does that claim of creating 100,000 jobs come from?

Well, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post got an answer from the Romney campaign. It’s the sum of job gains at three companies that Mr. Romney “helped to start or grow”: Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Mr. Kessler immediately pointed out two problems with this tally. It’s “based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain,” and it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.” Either problem, by itself, makes nonsense of the whole claim.

On the point about using current employment, consider Staples, which has more than twice as many stores now as it did back in 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain. Can he claim credit for everything good that has happened to the company in the past 12 years? In particular, can he claim credit for the company’s successful shift from focusing on price to focusing on customer service (“That was easy”), which took place long after he had left the business world?

Then there’s the bit about looking only at Bain-connected companies that added jobs, ignoring those that reduced their work forces or went out of business. Hey, if pluses count but minuses don’t, everyone who spends a day playing the slot machines comes out way ahead!

In any case, it makes no sense to look at changes in one company’s work force and say that this measures job creation for America as a whole.

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure. http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/06/krugman-bain-and-jobs/

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Amen. So, too, are Rick Perry's boasting about Texas having added so many jobs. Let's look at a few facts about THAT:

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Presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry has boasted of significant job growth in his state in the past few years. And for good reason: It’s true. While Texas clearly hasn’t avoided the recession, the state has done well in terms of increasing jobs, when compared with the recovery nationally.

Perry’s claim that “40 percent … of all the jobs in America were created in Texas” since June 2009 is accurate. But it’s also true that the increase in jobs hasn’t kept pace with the rise in the state’s population — so the number of jobless Texans also has risen, along with the state’s unemployment rate. And Texas is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of hourly workers paid at or below the minimum wage.

Texas job statistics are a mixed bag. Perry’s supporters and Perry’s detractors select the statistics that suit their spin. Here we’ll just lay out a balanced look at the facts — good and bad alike — and leave the spin to others.

Summary

Presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry has boasted of significant job growth in his state in the past few years. And for good reason: It’s true. While Texas clearly hasn’t avoided the recession, the state has done well in terms of increasing jobs, when compared with the recovery nationally.

Perry’s claim that “40 percent … of all the jobs in America were created in Texas” since June 2009 is accurate. But it’s also true that the increase in jobs hasn’t kept pace with the rise in the state’s population — so the number of jobless Texans also has risen, along with the state’s unemployment rate. And Texas is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of hourly workers paid at or below the minimum wage.

Texas job statistics are a mixed bag. Perry’s supporters and Perry’s detractors select the statistics that suit their spin. Here we’ll just lay out a balanced look at the facts — good and bad alike — and leave the spin to others.

Analysis

Fact: Texas is responsible for 40 percent of the nation’s job creation since June 2009.

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Perry, South Carolina, Aug. 13: Since June of 2009, Texas is home to 40 percent of all the jobs added in the United States.

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Perry has touted this statistic several times, and with the economy and jobs monopolizing the political discourse these days, it’s little wonder this has become a major talking point for the governor. On top of that, it’s true — even if there are some not-so-rosy-sounding statistics that go along with it. More on those in a minute.

Texas has done a fine job of adding to its employment numbers. Since June 2009, which marked the official end of the recession, until July 2011, the number of jobs increased in the state by 328,000. Nationally, the job growth in that time period was 697,000, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means Texas jobs made up 47 percent of the national net job creation.

What about Perry’s entire tenure as governor? Texas still looks better than the country overall. The state has added 1,081,900 jobs since December 2000, the month Perry took office. It’s an increase of 11.3 percent during his time as governor. Nationally, employment has gone down in this time frame, declining by 1,295,000, a nearly 1 percent drop.

Perry’s record is part of a long-term trend. Texas has done well in the jobs department for decades. “This point goes neglected,” says Bernard L. Weinstein, professor of business economics in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Yes, Texas has created more jobs than any other state” in the last two years. “But that’s been true since 1970. For the last 41 years Texas has added more jobs than any other state, and in most years, has led the nation in job creation,” Weinstein told us. “So Gov. Perry can claim that these jobs were created on his watch, but they were created on everybody else’s watch too.”

The San Antonio Express-News recently pointed out that past Texas governors have done well in terms of job creation, too. The state did even better when George W. Bush was governor; jobs went up 20.3 percent, though Bush’s 1995-2000 term also came during prosperous times. “A lot of what we’re doing is growing like we always grew,” Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, a think tank that advocates for low- and moderate-income families, told us, referring to both jobs and the state’s burgeoning population. “It’s a longer-term trend in Texas that’s just continuing.”

Fact: Despite the job gains, Texas’ unemployment rate has gone up.

While Texas has created jobs, the state hasn’t created enough of them to keep pace with a rising population and labor force. In fact, if we look at the June 2009 starting point that Perry refers to, unemployment got worse in Texas – going from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to 8.4 percent in July 2011. The national rate, meanwhile, improved – dropping from 9.5 percent to 9.1 percent.

The fact is, neither Texas, nor the nation, is adding jobs at a pace fast enough to bring down unemployment to historically normal levels. And Texas’ unemployment rate — while still below the national average — is now higher than that of 26 states.

The number of employed and the number of unemployed in Texas both have increased in the past three years, according to BLS data. So, while jobs have grown, the number of unemployed in the state has doubled since January 2008. How can a state add jobs while also adding unemployed workers? It simply adds population.

Texas is the second largest state, and its population — 25.1 million as of the 2010 census — has increased rapidly. It has gone up by 20.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, more than twice the rate of the U.S. overall, according to the Census Bureau.

“It’s a little hard to tell … whether job growth has led to population growth in Texas or vice versa,” says Lavine.

Perry’s supporters will say that people from other states have moved to Texas because of job opportunities. And that’s true for some. But a little more than half of the state’s population growth, 54 percent, was natural — births and deaths — from 2000 to 2009. The rest was split between domestic and international immigration, with 21.6 percent of the growth coming from people moving from other states and 23.7 percent coming from international migrants. That’s according to the Census Bureau and the Texas State Data Center.

“When you have more people, you generally have more jobs,” Howard Wial, an economist and fellow with The Brookings Institution, said in an interview with FactCheck.org. “When more people move in, wages don’t rise. They might fall a little bit,” which, in turn, can be an impetus for job creation. “When there are more jobs created, more people want to move in.”

Fact: Texas, along with Mississippi, has the highest percentage of hourly workers at or below the minimum wage.

In Texas, 9.5 percent of workers paid hourly rates earn at or below minimum wage. That gives the state the highest percentage in the nation, tied with Mississippi, according to BLS data.

In 2000, the percentage of hourly workers paid at or below minimum wage was a little under 6 percent. Perry took office in December of that year, and the percentage declined, reaching about 3 percent of hourly workers in 2006. It then jumped back up in the next few years

In addition to low wages, many jobs come with low benefits. Texas has the highest percentage of residents lacking health insurance — 26 percent — among U.S. states.

The jobs created also match the workforce, says Lavine, and he’s concerned that the state needs to do a better job of educating and training its labor force. “Yes, it’s better to have a job than not have a job, but as we move into the 21st century,” he says, “it would be much better to have a highly skilled workforce that was able to compete in a service economy.” He cites a study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which estimated that in 2018, Texas would rank first among the states in the proportion of jobs for high-school dropouts. The state would rank 31st, according to the study, in the proportion of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree. More at http://www.factcheck.org/2011/08/texas-size-recovery/ --I'm just focusing on the claims by Perry of job creation.

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So to a degree what he says is right, but the devil is in the details. Distilled down to a one-sentence talking point makes it easy for Romney and Perry to say they've been "job creators", but in Romney's case, his rivals working so hard to show the details that put the lie to the claim are wonderful to see.

I can't wait for more. This entire election season of seeing the Republicans put up a slate of candidates who have created such an enjoyable circus has been fun, but watching them eat their own, and in the process shine a spotlight on their mentality, which focuses on profits at the expense of people and long-term stability, is especially delicious. No doubt it won't continue, they'll pull back and people will forget, means nothing...the Dems will be more than happy to bring the spotlight back in the general election, and some may remember that "the Republicans said it first". We'll see.