He keeps claiming he’ll create twelve million jobs by the end of his first term. Putting aside the fact that several groups of economists say that would happen no matter what a President Romney might do:
“Moody’s Analytics, in an August forecast, predicts 12 million jobs will be created by 2016, no matter who is president. And Macroeconomic Advisors in April also predicted a gain of 12.3 million jobs”
it looks like these numbers too, like so many others in his campaign, are faked. Glenn Kessler at the WaPo digs around for what’s behind them. He starts off quoting a Romney campaign ad:
“Let me tell you how I will create 12 million jobs when President Obama couldn’t. First, my energy independence policy means more than 3 million new jobs, many of them in manufacturing. My tax reform plan to lower rates for the middle class and for small business creates 7 million more. And expanding trade, cracking down on China and improving job training takes us to over 12 million new jobs.”
Kessler finds that four of Romney’s economic advisers wrote a white paper claiming that the Romney plan would create 250,000 jobs per month for four years, which adds up to twelve million.
Ah, but nowhere in the white paper is this 3 million plus 7 million plus 2 million equation mentioned. So where does it come from? Well:
We asked the Romney campaign, and the answer turns out to be: totally different studies … with completely different timelines.
For instance, the claim that 7 million jobs would be created from Romney’s tax plan is a 10-year number, derived from a study written by John W. Diamond, a professor at Rice University.
This study at least assesses the claimed effect of specific Romney policies. The rest of the numbers are even more squishy.
For instance, the 3-million-jobs claim for Romney’s energy policies appears largely based on a Citigroup Global Markets study that did not even evaluate Romney’s policies. Instead, the report predicted 2.7 million to 3.6 million jobs would be created over the next eight years, largely because of trends and policies already adopted — including tougher fuel efficiency standards that Romney has criticized and suggested he would reverse.
The 2-million-jobs claim from cracking down on China is also very suspicious.
This figure comes from a 2011 International Trade Commission report, which estimated that there could be a gain of 2.1 million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. intellectual property rights. The estimate is highly conditional and pegged to the job market in 2011, when there was high unemployment. “It is unclear when China might implement the improvement in IPR protection envisioned in the analysis, and equally unclear whether the United States will face as much excess labor supply then as it does today,” the report says.
And Kessler got Glenn Hubbard, a co-author of that white paper, to admit that the twelve million they wrote about has no relation to the twelve million made up of the 3+7+2M Romney’s ads cite.
“The big point is the 3+7+2 does not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years (different source of growth and different time period),” Hubbard acknowledged in an e-mail.
Good for Kessler for fact-checking, but as we’ve seen, Romney’s campaign doesn’t seem to care if it’s caught in lies. It just shakes the Etch-a-Sketch and keeps repeating them.
Remember how we hoped the election of Obama meant we had reached a post-racial society? With Romney we’ve reached a post-truth society.