Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer
Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.
Except Mitt Romney was not a
businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold,
flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the
old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in
the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of
production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious
amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and
castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up
as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for
resale—the faster the better.
That
is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an
honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because
it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a
regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and
capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant
speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering
down the cost of leveraged finance.
Read it at The Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-and-the-bain-drain.html
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