When you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot… And so if your main argument for how to grow the economy is ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about.

President Obama on why Mitt Romney’s record in the private sector matters

When it is a business model, and when it is deliberate, and when it is a thought-out strategy on how to take the value out of a company in a reckless way and hurt others—and you then become a proponent of that strategy, and talk about it as if it’s the soul of capitalism, and literally the soul of America—I think nothing could be more offensive.

David Foster, lead negotiator for workers at GST Steel, a victim of Romney economics

We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants.

So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages.

… What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, “Wasting Our Minds.”

Go read the whole damned thing.

(via inothernews)

We know this about Mitt Romney…he’s not a job creator. When he was governor of Massachusetts, they were 47th out of 50 in job creation. His experiences in downsizing and outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies and walking away with a lot of money for himself. His economic ideas are the failed economic ideas that we tried for eight years…their message is: You didn’t clean up our mess fast enough.

Top Obama adviser Robert Gibbs, on Meet the Press Sunday.

(via tpmmedia)