Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

News

Republican platform adds resolution to audit the Federal Reserve

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From San Francisco Chronicle.

Excerpt:

 The Republican Party platform promises to replace what it criticizes as President Barack Obama’s debt-swollen entitlement society with “a roaring job market to match a roaring economy.”

The platform reflects the influence of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, offering as the remedy for the nation’s economic ills a familiar recipe of low taxes, light regulation, expanded oil drilling and free enterprise. It vows to reduce personal and corporate taxes, repeal Obama’s health-care law, promote small businesses and avoid taxpayer bailouts of troubled financial institutions.

The 62-page roadmap, approved by a voice vote of the delegates yesterday at the party’s national convention in Tampa, Florida, promotes expanded trade and accuses the Obama administration of “a virtual surrender” to commercial rival China. The Asian country is stealing American trade secrets, manipulating its currency to make its exports cheaper, and hampering U.S. firms trying to sell to Chinese customers, the Republicans say.

Republicans call for banks to be “well-capitalized” and pledge to repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law.

Along with major economic policy shifts, the Republicans vow to transform the size and scope of government. Trillion- dollar annual budget deficits and mounting debt are harming job growth, they say. “The massive federal government is structurally and financially broken,” the platform says.

[…]Echoing a longtime demand of libertarian Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the platform calls for an annual audit of the Federal Reserve. And it proposes a commission to investigate “possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar,” a reference to a potential revival of the gold standard.

The campaign document labels Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored mortgage financiers, as “a primary cause of the housing crisis because their implicit government guarantee allowed them to avoid market discipline and make risky investments.”

That view, though widely held among conservatives, has been rejected by the Federal Reserve and three of the four Republicans on the government commission that investigated the 2008 financial meltdown.

Note that both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan support auditing the Federal Reserve.

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney called for increased transparency at the Federal Reserve Monday, voicing his strongest support yet for an audit of the country’s central banking system.

“The answer is yes to that, very plain and simple,” Romney responded, when asked by a supporter at a New Hampshire town hall whether it was time to audit the Fed. “The Federal Reserve should be accountable. We should see what they’re doing.”

The mark aligns Romney with a growing cadre of conservatives championing an audit of the Federal Reserve, a group led by Romney’s primary opponent Ron Paul and his acolytes. Earlier this month,Paul’s “Audit The Fed” bill passed the House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan support.

After taking a more measured stance on the issue during the Republican primaries, Romney has slowly moved to embrace a Federal Reserve audit as support for the issue grows with voters across the political spectrum. Romney’s new running mate, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, has been a vocal critic of the central banking system, and is listed as one of 268 co-sponsors of Paul’s bill. 

Romney has also said that he will not reappoint Ben Bernanke if he is elected. I think that Ron Paul supporters should be able to decide who to support in the general election based on this information.

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Mitt Romney unveils detailed energy plan to create jobs and lower gas prices

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From Yahoo News.

Excerpt:

Mitt Romney unveiled an energy plan Thursday that would give states the power to determine whether drilling and mining should occur on federal lands within their borders as part of a larger effort to increase domestic oil, coal and natural gas production and achieve energy independence by 2020.

[…]Under current law, the federal government controls oil, coal and gas permits for federal lands. But Romney argued determination should be up to state officials, insisting individual states are in a better position to “develop, adopt and enforce regulations” on local basis than the federal government–which his campaign says has been unduly influenced by Washington politics.

This is going to get him some votes in North Dakota, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Alaska, etc. We have a lot of energy just waiting to be extracted from the Bakken an Shale and the Marcellus Shale, for example. Just keep the federal government out it and get on with getting the price of gas back under $2. Put people back to work, too.

A policy paper released ahead of the candidate’s speech by the Romney campaign argues President Barack Obama “has intentionally sought to shut down oil, gas and coal production in pursuit of his own alternative energy agenda.”

Romney said that loosening regulations on the energy industry will benefit taxpayers by lowering gas costs and reducing the cost of consumer goods, which have increased as companies pay higher energy prices. He’ll argue that allowing more federal drilling would not only bring money back into the nation’s budget but would result in lower energy prices that could create jobs, lower the trade deficit and increase the nation’s security.

“Three million jobs come back to this country by taking advantage of something we have right underneath our feet. That’s oil, and gas, and coal. We’re going to make it happen. We’re going to create those jobs,” Romney said Thursday. “Let me tell you what else it does. It adds $500 billion to the size of our economy. That is more good wages. That’s an opportunity for more Americans to have a bright and prosperous future.”

The push is part of what Romney touted as an effort to achieve energy independence by 2020, a plan that also includes expanding offshore energy development along the coast of Virginia and North and South Carolina as well as approval of the Keystone energy pipeline linking Canada to the United States.

I think that Romney is doing a good job now of articulating specific policies that will fix the economy.

News

526 economists, including 5 Nobel prize winners, grade Romney and Obama plans

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Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor Force Participation Rate

From the Daily Caller:

The 526 economists — including Nobel laureates Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes — point to six facets of Romney’s economic approach that they see as beneficial to future economic success.

  • Reduce marginal tax rates on business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment, jobs, and living standards.
  • End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
  • Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
  • Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
  • Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
  • Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.

Seven of the signatories are from Harvard University and five from Columbia University — two of President Barack Obama’s alma maters.

The economists’ statement of support pillories Obama’s economic record, claiming that his expansion of the federal government has resulted in “anemic economic recovery and high unemployment,” which will continue if his future plans are implemented.

Among the Obama policies with which the 526 economists take issue include:

  • Relied on short-term “stimulus” programs, which provided little sustainable lift to the economy, and enacted and proposed significant tax increases for all Americans.
  • Offered no plan to reduce federal spending and stop the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio.
  • Failed to propose Social Security reform and offered a Medicare proposal that relies on a panel of bureaucrats to set prices, quantities, and qualities of healthcare services.
  • Favored a large expansion of economic regulation across many sectors, with little regard for proper cost-benefit analysis and with a disturbing degree of favoritism toward special interests.
  • Enacted health care legislation that centralizes health care decisions and increases the power of the federal bureaucracy to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on patients and doctors, and creates greater incentives for waste.
  • Favored expansion of one-size-fits-all federal rulemaking, with an erosion of the ability of state and local governments to make decisions appropriate for their particular circumstances.

We can’t afford four more years of incompetence and failure. We need to ask ourselves what economists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams would do. And they wouldn’t give Obama four more years. We need a change.