Oh yes of course. That completely destroys my argument.
Well, I guess since the company didn’t offer stock, that clearly shows right there he couldn’t have been responsible.
:rolleyes:
Why don’t you ask Bain and Romney? He was described in their SEC filings as Bain’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president” until 2002.
Which I’ve already posted, and you’ve already ignored once.
The claim you sneer at is not the OP’s. It is Bain’s.
First you said that Shakes’ initial statement “wasn’t true at all”, and now you’re just talking about “sole stockholder”. So are you now saying that Shakes had it mostly right, and you’re only concerned with that one part of it? Way to move the goalposts.
And surely you’re aware that it’s been widely reported that the Bain SEC 2001 filing stated that Romney was the sole shareholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president of Bain. Are you saying that this is not true? That the SEC filing was false? Do you think Romney lied when he signed it?
Also, it seems like you’re now quibbling over Shakes saying “sole stockholder” when the Bain (according to you) doesn’t issue stocks. Well, it seems to me that if he was the sole shareholder, then of course no shares were issued to anyone else, since he had them all. Are you really claiming Bain didn’t have stocks at all? Then why did the SEC filing describe Romney as the “sole shareholder”? And “shareholder” and “stockholder” are synonyms, according to Wikipedia.
I’m not anything approaching the level of Mitt Romney, but when I retired from the Army and worked 5 years in State government I distinctly had quite a few things that were made inconvenient because I didn’t have as much money as I’d have liked. When I was younger, I remember lots of times not having enough money for things (although I was insulated from it to a degree because while in service many of your expenses are covered.) I went into business with some partners after my 5 years working for the commonwealth and have become fairly prosperous.
You’re 100% correct money doesn’t erase all your problems, but having money erases one big problem that most people always have to worry about, and lack of money can exacerbate all other problems in your life.
Romney should be proud of his time at Bain. The truth is the people he laid off were not productive and needed laid off, and Romney created more wealth at Bain and more jobs at Bain than he destroyed, that’s capitalism.
I won’t dispute the wording of the SEC filing, but I do dispute the accuracy of what was in that filing. Mainly the “sole stockholder” part, if true Bain Capital would be the weirdest venture I’ve ever heard of…why would two other people help Romney start Bain, and contribute money to starting it up, but not take any ownership stake? That just seems unlikely to me.
It started in 1984. Maybe he bought them out in the years between.
That makes sense.
You don’t have the slightest clue if either of those statements is true. You believe them because it fits your ideaology, your twisted worship of capitalism/free market. A worship you extend to its priesthood the super wealthy.
Why don’t you and your co-religionist Rand Rover grow some courage and admit you admire Mitt Romney because he’s wealthy and for no other reason. The payoff for your religious devotion, your glorification of people who are richer than you are, is that you’re allowed to look down on the people who are poorer than you are. And there’s a lot more of those, so you feel like you’re in the winners’ bracket.
Here’s a homily for you; When people in this country stop despising people who are poorer than them, they’ll stop admiring people who are richer. And vice versa.
Also I think it’s hilarious that GOP voters are stuck with Mitt Romney in November. The honest truth is you don’t KNOW how he’s going to govern. You don’t know whether to trust his record or his rhetoric. Listening to conservatives coming to the half-hearted defense of his seemingly daily missteps would only going to get more amusing over the months if it weren’t so sad.
Actually it is liberals who can’t understand the basic tenets of economics without injecting irrelevant ideology. If it hurts any blue collar worker then liberals contend it is evil. Liberals have vastly contradictory and stupid ideas on what makes the economy work.
Barack Obama thinks the way forward is to subsidize American manufacturers with special tax breaks, and to mumble vague rhetoric about the evils of outsourcing.
Bain Capital lead to productivity increases at Staples, which lead to some people losing their jobs. Especially overpriced local distributors and sellers of office equipment. But the beneficiaries were every other company that used office supplies, cheaper office supplies made those companies more productive which created far more jobs.
Religion is for the stupid and the weak, but if anyone is to worship something they should worship capitalism, unlike the false godhead of Christianity that has never done a single positive thing in history, capitalism delivers.
In 1800 the entire world was poor, in the West there was a thin film of rich and powerful people at the top. This is in stark contrast to today, sure there is great income and wealth inequality in capitalist America, but time and time again it must be pointed out wealth and income inequality is irrelevant when overall prosperity is high. Unlike the 99% in 1800 Great Britain, our 99% do not live in abject squalor the likes of which most people on these boards could never imagine. Instead, even some of our poorest people enjoy refrigerated food, air conditioning, reliable winter heating, personal automobiles and the ones who work might have several hours a day and several days a week during daylight hours when they are not working. People in 1800 had none of those things, they worked from the moment the sun rose until the moment it set, at horrible back breaking labor that reduced life span and stole from them any chance at the leisure time most of us take for granted. They were also stuck in a system in which random fluctuations in the weather could still lead to famine and death.
Since 1800, everywhere that capitalism has taken root we have seen nothing but massive increases in productivity, prosperity, and happiness. Someone born in 1930 America and still alive today would have seen a six fold increase in wealth during their lifetime, simply unimaginable in the pre-capitalist world. From the years 500-1800 it’s quite likely during that entire span you didn’t see a six-fold increase in wealth. Most likely wealth remained almost entirely flat.
Capitalism has delivered more people from squalor, poverty, and desperation than all the worthless idiots in the Peace Corps and such combined and multiplied over a thousand times.
Further, capitalism has produced liberty. For over a thousand years aristocratic ancient regimes which had controlled all power through their control of the land had gone essentially unchallenged. Everywhere capitalism took root the aristrocrats power was destroyed and it has never recovered. The old aristrocrats were inefficient, lazy, and unproductive, capitalism allowed those who could more efficiently operate to generate greater and greater shares of societal wealth. The aristocrats were bankrupted, and with their wealth went their power. In their place arose democratic systems of government, which while not perfect, proceeded to increase liberty perpetually from that time until now.
Everywhere that has rejected capitalism has seen the opposite of the above. They have seen human misery, poverty, starvation and destruction on massive scales. They have seen the complete erasure of all liberties and enslavement by powerful regimes of bureaucrats and technocrats.
People that are opposed to capitalism are essentially embracing human misery, death, and absolutism. To me, that makes them essentially “enemies of mankind” and the worst, most abominable monsters around.
I admire Mitt Romney’s ability to run a business and become wealthy. Anyone who doesn’t admire that in general is stupid. I like other things about Romney, though. I don’t know that I generally admire him overall, he’s got a lot of negatives. (One of them–that he is hard to read on his political positions, you’ve already mentioned.) What I know is this, Romney believes in capitalism which is the only true engine of human prosperity. Obama does not, and thus Obama is an unacceptable demon who should be driven from his position lest he enslave us further with poverty and desperation.
OK, I’m gonna have to ask for a cite that Obama does not believe in capitalism. He may not believe in the kind of capitalism that comes out of a Dickens novel where it’s OK to burn orphans in the hearth to keep the counting house warm, but he’s clearly not the socialist that Fox News makes him out to be.
When Romney drives people into poverty and desperation, it’s because those people needed laying off. When Obama does the same, it’s because he’s an unacceptable demon. Got it.
And who knew that the employment situation in the world’s most powerful economy hinged on the price of paperclips. Who knew?
I do hope **Martin **was engaging in a bit of satire for us. I really do hope that. But I’m not sure.
This highlights the economic infancy of liberals.
Capitalism rewards people that can more efficiently allocate resources. When you more efficiently allocate resources, some people suffer. People who were put out of business by Staples suffered and their employees that lost their jobs suffered. But the productivity gains were much more significant, and lead to many businesses being able to operate more efficiently because of reduced prices, which would have allowed them to hire more people.
This is where the infantile economic proficiency of liberals falls apart. A liberal refuses to believe that by destroying economic inefficiency you can actually increase overall productivity and prosperity. Full stop. Liberals think that this is a “conservative myth”, it’s a conservative myth the same way evolution is “just a theory.” Which is to say it’s not a myth at all but absolute, bedrock fact.
Secondly, ask a liberal: “If a company can lay off 100 workers in an expensive and unproductive division and use the savings to start a new division that develops a new product that becomes highly profitable and eventually employs 1,000 workers directly and several thousand more in other companies who benefit from the new invention, does that justify laying off the 100 workers?” Liberals won’t even answer that question. The obvious answer is yes it justifies it, but liberals assert such situations are “fanciful” and not real. But in fact that is exactly reality and exactly how capitalist economies have been functioning for over two hundred years.
As for the final point about Staples, Staples is one venture Bain Capital was involved in. I never said the entire economy hinged on the pricing of office supplies, you are both dishonest and stupid for even suggesting that I was making such an argument. I was simply pointing out one example where people might bitch and say Bain destroyed jobs, but they actually created jobs.
I feel sorry for the Germans. The govt has gotten involved in the economy by restricting how many hours workers are required to put in and how much vacation time they get, and has perverted the market by setting industrial policy. They also had the audacity to make people have medical coverage available whether they want it or not. Look what happened to them; it’s a shame really.
Thank God we live in the United States, the country with the second highest per-capita income in North America.
Because everyone knows support for capitalism means opposition to all government regulation. The German system has its positives and negatives, it has lead to higher structural unemployment but more stability. That’s one reason for example Volkswagen has been increasing market share. During prior periods of economic recession many automakers laid off significant portions of their workforce, in Germany this isn’t so easy to do, so Volkswagen mostly had to keep all of its employees.
When the recession ended, demand went up, and all the other automakers that had laid off a bunch of people had to scramble to hire new employees to meet demand. Volkswagen already had those employees ready and took advantage, increasing significantly its market share in Europe and notably for the first time in many years Volkswagen is becoming a much bigger player in the United States. Volkswagen could actually become the world’s biggest automaker in the next ten years.
The German system as I said has its positives and negatives, but it’s a capitalist system. Board liberals act like capitalism only exists in pure laissez-faire form anything other than that style of capitalism capitalism, liberals want to label as something else because capitalism is eeeevillll. Well no, it’s not “social democracy” or whatever you want to call it, it’s just capitalism with state regulations. Even in its infancy most states regulated capitalism to some degree. This is the “Great False Dichotomy of Capitalism” that liberals love to talk about, to them if you support capitalism then you oppose all regulations, which is just stupid, ignorant, and inaccurate.
Which number is higher, $49,000 or $41,000? The U.S. is $49,000, Canada is $41,000. So unless you were talking about Mexico (I admit I haven’t checked for GDP per capita numbers), you actually live in the country with the highest per-capita income in North America.
I know what you’re talking about though, and like most liberals it shows you don’t really understand anything at all about economics. A few weeks ago an article came out revealing that for the first time in however many years (maybe ever) Canadians had a higher average net worth than Americans. Net worth isn’t income, net worth is your personal assets minus your personal liabilities. Income is how much money you make on a periodic basis.
Most of the Canadian overtaking is, by the way, because of lower personal debt and higher property values–which are mostly the result of Canada not suffering such a disastrous real estate bubble which devalued their property. Canadians since the 90s have actually been living smart, on both a government and personal level, getting less indebted personally and working to hold down debts at a government level.
We have a lot to learn from Canada in those regards I say, but let’s not just make up facts, we still make more than them per capita. But because you are ignorant of economics you’ve confused net worth for per capita income.
I genuinely wish there were more substance and less rhetoric when we ‘discuss’ these matters.
There is a strong disconnect between the people who hold the reins of economic power in 21st century America and those who do not.
Until this is recognized, we will never reach any accommodation or compromise.
Plutocracy is not a valid alternative to a republic.
That’s some mighty fine speechifying there, Martin, but the next time I want to know how a liberal will answer a question, I think I’ll just ask a liberal.
Since you seem to think you know all of my opinions already, I see no point to responding to most of what you’ve said. But the idea that a company will hire people not because they have a need for employees but because they have a little more money for payroll due to discount paperclips is simply laughable. Cheap paperclips do not create jobs, demand for products or services creates jobs. Even someone as stupid as myself knows this.
I believe I can state with some confidence that he’s serious. He really believes Obama’s a demon.
They’ll probably lie, assuming they’re smart enough to understand the question. Best stick with what Martin Hyde says liberals think.