My very first thread started in the “Elections” forum and within minutes, it crashes the board and gets bumped to The Pit. That’s a bit of an auspicious beginning…
That’s what got me starting this thread. He had no reason to say something like “start packing”. Maybe something like, “Look out, we’re coming for you.” “Start packing” just came out of nowhere.
I would say that doing something that somehow improves the world, even a little bit. Gates, to use my own example, brought a remarkable product to market and has made a boat load of money as a result. His products improve people’s lives, productivity, etc. (Yes, Microsoft products have “issues”, but they do mostly work.) Romney cannot point to any such innovation. He rescued Staples. It’s not like there weren’t other big-box office supply retailers. Staples, whether you like them or not, does not bring anything new to the marketplace. He turned a profit at Staples and made a lot of money doing so. That, while highly profitable, is not necessarily an improvement in the world. I will grant him credit for saving the Salt Lake City Olympics. I think the world is a better place because we hold such events.
I would like to see Romney offer some real suggestions on how to improve things. His only suggestions are things that we already know won’t work (for the vast majority of Americans).
I think “corporate success” can be broken down into different categories, as well. I can see a bit of crossover between the skills of a CEO and a president; managing a large organization with diverse components, hiring able subordinates and knowing what to delegate to them (and what not to), planning for long-term and short-term. But there’s a whole category of successful investors who do none of that. They aren’t in charge of people so much as they are managing money, and look for where it can do them the most good. When they decide it’s time to cash out of one company and buy into another, they do it. That’s not really an option for a president.
I gather that the private equity/venture capital world that Romney worked in was rather a combination of the two; looking for the best companies to invest in, having some say in their operations, and then cashing out.
Holy lol. Watching you Obama-haters try to mimic actual argument tends to be a mixture of amusing and baffling. For your enlightenment, there wasn’t an analogy there.
I don’t know the job figures on state and local, but spending has steadily gone up at pretty much every level of government for decades, so it seems pretty likely the same trends would hold.
Maybe Shodan has the typing equivalent of Tourettes:
Shodan’s Thoughts: Why that was a compelling argument, well presented and backed up by facts. Perhaps my initial position on this issue is the wrong one.
Spending has been falling enormously at the state level in most states lately, because most state constitutions forbid deficit spending. There have been huge numbers of state employees laid off. And in at least some cases that’s not only since 2008.
So that’s why I suspect total government employment is probably falling (and cuts in federal payments to the states are partially responsible.) It hasn’t done much to help the economy.
Total State & Local spending 1990: 1 trillion
Total State & Local spending 2000: 1.7 trillion
Total State & Local spending 2010 (est): 3.1 trillion
Total State & Local spending 2015 (est): 3.6 trillion
And yet Gates, according to some accounts, ruthlessly crushed his competitors, forcing computer manufacturers to carry his other software products if they wished to use Windows. It’s true his products improve people’s lives, but we can’t know what other products might have been even better, had they not been crushed under Gates’ heel… a practice that led to the Justice Department suing Microsoft.
And Romney saved jobs – it’s hard for me to understand why the simple act of making sure people have a steady paycheck doesn’t count, to at least some degree, as making the world better.
I guess the point I’m making is that your criteria for success seem arbitrary, especially if Gates can pass them without comment but Romney cannot.
Yeah, looking around his site frankly I have some questions about his data and what they actually are but when I mentioned “spending” I was being sloppy.
Since a lot of transfer payments – including things like unemployment – are through the states, spending is liable to go up during an economic slump. And of course not all states are experiencing budget crises, so some of them may well still be hiring and spending. But we were talking about employment and having looked at employment figures in my state, they certainly haven’t been increasing here.
In 2000, there were 15,077,703 state and local government employees, earning $46 million per month in total pay.
In 2010, there there were 16,581,617 state and local government employees, earning $70 million per month in total pay.
The source is the US census.
Look, the facts are easy to find; the Googling took me about 30 seconds. But facts won’t do you any good if you’re determined not to see them.
Outside of liberal hypocrisy? Well, for one thing, some of us here had long excoriated Gates for his boundless greed and appalling arrogance. Then he got married, and we beheld the miraculous healing power of Sacred Nookie. I personally regard his campaign and his funding of the war against malaria to be a fine and near-perfect act of atonement.
Mitt? Wants to be President. He doesn’t seem to have any other identifiable agenda, save for that central ambition. He will say anything to anybody to that end, he would disembowel Anne on the altar of Cthulu if it would win him Florida, if mosquitoes could vote, he would denounce Gates.
But we thank you, yet again, for your unceasing vigilance against liberal hypocrisy. And I thank you in advance for your next contribution, in case I am absent tomorrow.
Gee, I’ve always viewed Gates as a convicted monopolist who invented very little on his own, and took advantage of good fortune and illegal business practices to suppress his competition and establish a shoddy, second-rate operating system as the industry standard, costing society countless millions of lost hours of productivity as a result.
It’s his fault that you consider products that “mostly work” to be acceptable, even today! He certainly changed the world more than Romney did - I think it is quite a stretch to say he changed it for the better.