Why is private sector experience so trumpeted by the GOP?

[Crown_Prince_of_Irony]

The real irony is that the GOP is all in a lather about “executive experience” this, and “CEO” that - when it’s the overexuberance of the private sector to pursue profit above all else (with the willing participation of the average American consumer, yours truly included) that got us in our current economic predicament.

And a lot of the corproate decisions that got us here were largely driven by lavish executive bonus packages that rewarded executives for risky short-term growth without regard for the longer-term consequenses.

[zamboniracer]

@Little_Nemo

I’m not going to dispute that Romney did a good job running the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. But does running an Olympic committee really qualify as private sector experience? It’s not like it was competing with other committees to manage the games.

But for the record, Romney does have legitimate experience in the private sector running Bain Capital.

Running the SLCOC, wasn’t his solution just to throw money, much of it from the US Government, at the problem?

Bain Capital, as I understand it, is a consulting firm that specializes in moving companies and their factories offshore. If that’s true, (and it may not be, it is just my impression of Bain Capital) is it something to brag about as a candidate for POTUS?

[suranyi]

This is something that has always really bugged me.

Yes, there are a few ways in which government and business are similar. They both should be run in an efficient manner, for example.

But they are fundamentally very, very different. At the most basic level. For example, the goal of a business is to create a profit, in fact to create as much profit as possible. Now people differ on what they think the goal of government should be but I don’t think there’s much disagreement that the goal of government is NOT to create a profit.

[Onomatopoeia]

@Recovering_Republican

What, you don’t like tomato flavored cardboard?

Hey, I thought Dominoes had the market on tomato flavored cardboard.

[Boyo_Jim]

No, Domino’s has cardboard flavored tomato.

[Little_Nemo]

@zamboniracer

Running the SLCOC, wasn’t his solution just to throw money, much of it from the US Government, at the problem?

Bain Capital, as I understand it, is a consulting firm that specializes in moving companies and their factories offshore. If that’s true, (and it may not be, it is just my impression of Bain Capital) is it something to brag about as a candidate for POTUS?

I don’t think that’s a fair picture. The original leadership of the Olympic committee had been a pretty sad bunch - they were beset by accusations of corruption (both giving and receiving) and were doing a terrible job of raising money (mostly because a lot of potential sponsors didn’t trust them with money). Romney took over and cleared out the corruption. That, and his connections with the corporate world, got the sponsorship money flowing.

Bain Capital is more of an investment company than a consulting firm. Their original mission was to find companies that had a good business plan but needed start-up money. Bain Capital would provide the money.

Romney did change the mission somewhat over the course of his tenure. He started investing in and gaining controlling shares in existing companies rather than primarily start-ups.

But overall Bain Capital made steady profits under Romney’s leadership. When Bain Capital’s parent company was experiencing financial problems, Romney was promoted to CEO of that company and made it profitable again. So he deserves legitimate credit as a successful business executive.

[Zakalwe]

@Little_Nemo

But overall Bain Capital made steady profits under Romney’s leadership. When Bain Capital’s parent company was experiencing financial problems, Romney was promoted to CEO of that company and made it profitable again. So he deserves legitimate credit as a successful business executive.

But wasn’t some of the return to profitability based on the fact that he reduced costs by offshoring jobs?

[Little_Nemo]

I’m sure there was some job offshoring in companies Bain was involved in. Bain Capital invested in literally hundreds of companies during the fourteen years Romney was running it. But it doesn’t seem to have been a standard procedure for them. They don’t appear to have been doing any more job offshoring than any company of similar size would have been doing.

The main offshoring accusation that’s been made against Bain (and Romney) is over taxes. Bain apparently registered some of its administrative operations outside of the United States in foreign tax havens.

[Recovering_Republican]

@Little_Nemo

I’m sure there was some job offshoring in companies Bain was involved in. Bain Capital invested in literally hundreds of companies during the fourteen years Romney was running it. But it doesn’t seem to have been a standard procedure for them. They don’t appear to have been doing any more job offshoring than any company of similar size would have been doing.

The main offshoring accusation that’s been made against Bain (and Romney) is over taxes. Bain apparently registered some of its administrative operations outside of the United States in foreign tax havens.

I think it’s more the image.

When Ted Kennedy ran against Romney in 1994, when people were ready to hang any Democrat they could get their hands on, Kennedy successfully pointed out what Romney did at AmPad, where he put a bunch of people out of jobs, looted the company and eventually left the stockholders with worthless paper.

It is VERY bad form for a rich guy to put working people out of work and then hire illegal aliens to do his yardwork.

[Voyager]

@Little_Nemo

I’m sure there was some job offshoring in companies Bain was involved in. Bain Capital invested in literally hundreds of companies during the fourteen years Romney was running it. But it doesn’t seem to have been a standard procedure for them. They don’t appear to have been doing any more job offshoring than any company of similar size would have been doing.

The main offshoring accusation that’s been made against Bain (and Romney) is over taxes. Bain apparently registered some of its administrative operations outside of the United States in foreign tax havens.

His business experience is exactly opposite that needed for governing. My understanding is that they bought companies, cut costs, and sold them off. Offshoring is just one way of doing it. You don’t buy hundreds of companies with the goal of improving their productivity and such, but it is much easier to do so when your goal is to improve their short term bottom line. However, you can’t sell of chunks of the government in this way.
It would be interesting to track the success of these companies after Romney got through with them.
I’ve been through this. During the AT&T trivestiture Bob Allen set up a program to cut the headcount of what would become Lucent by offering a very generous severance package. This was done to make the numbers look better for the coming Lucent IPO. In my center about 20% of the staff left, and it all happened over a 2 week period with no secession planning or handoffs at all. I’m not complaining, I made a bundle splitting then, but it was hellish for those who were left. I wouldn’t want a person who was successful using these techniques anywhere near the US government, and it has nothing to do with their morality.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Elmer_J.Fudd

I’m hard pressed to think of an extremely successful businessperson who was also an extremely successful elected official. Michael Bloomberg, maybe, but who else?

Herbert Hoover was an extremely successful private sector engineer and businessman before being tapped to head several famine relief efforts during WWI. Then he more or less built the Department of Commerce from the ground up.

Then he was elected President, and that… didn’t go well.

Anyway, I bring this up because Hoover was arguably the first prominent politician to promote the idea that government is inefficient and riddled with waste and the private sector isn’t.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Herbert Hoover was an extremely successful private sector engineer and businessman before being tapped to head several famine relief efforts during WWI. Then he more or less built the Department of Commerce from the ground up.

Then he was elected President, and that… didn’t go well.

Anyway, I bring this up because Hoover was arguably the first prominent politician to promote the idea that government is inefficient and riddled with waste and the private sector isn’t.

Cite?

Seriously, the Republicans had been in power during the entire 1920s. They kept the government deliberately small and catered to business interests with Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury with more real-world power than the president. What waste and inefficiency was Hoover campaigning against? He did say repeatedly that government was not the proper institution to get people out of the Depression but the reality was that government spending went up every year during his term of office.

And he wasn’t coming out of the private sector. In addition to what you mentioned, he got the nomination because he directed the governmental relief organizations during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The private sector failed miserably then.

Can you defend your statement?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Cite?

Here you go. I didn’t say he was correct; merely that he was the first to make it a talking point.

[guizot]

@boytyperanma

It’s trumpeted by the Republican party because that’s where a lot of their people come from.

True, but fundamentally they do this only when they’re trying to oust an incumbent Democrat. It’s the “we need new blood” line of political rhetoric, and because the Republicans also try to be identified with “small government,” it’s most convenient to play this card when someone is coming out of business.

Romney is just as much an old-school politician as a business person. No one stays in government long without becoming political. That’s the nature of the beast. Bush couldn’t use the business angle for his reelection (though he really couldn’t have used it for his first election, either)–instead, it was all “national security.” He certainly couldn’t have run on the “government has gotten too big,” thing. In fact, “national security” was a way to make the government even bigger and even more wasteful.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Here you go. I didn’t say he was correct; merely that he was the first to make it a talking point.

Here’s the actual wording:

National politics

In U.S. national politics, the most prominent figure was Herbert Hoover, a trained engineer who downplayed politics and believed dispassionate, nonpolitical experts could solve the nation’s great problems, such as ending poverty.

Attacks on efficiency

After 1929, Democrats blamed the Great Depression on Hoover and helped to somewhat discredit the movement, though the demand for efficiency and elimination of waste remains an important component of American values.

I can’t see any way you can conflate these two sentences into to get at your claim. Dispassionate experts and eliminating government waste are historically separate trends in politics. The limited government of the 1920s was constantly called upon to do more rather than less. We had no Army, no social services programs, no health programs, no infrastructure programs. What wastes were people talking about cutting?

OTOH, wanting nonpolitical experts to solve problems was very fashionable at the time. There was a movement, in fact, called Technocracy which not only advocated this but became a minor force in response to Hoover’s failures. It began before Hoover and he was never a big part of it.

The time has come in our national development when we must have a definite national program in the development of our great engineering problems. Our rail and water transport, our water supplies for irrigation, our reclamation, the provision of future fuel resources, all cry out for some broadvisioned national guidance.

That sounds like Hoover, because it was. He wanted efficiency but he didn’t campaign against waste in government in any sense we would recognize from today’s Republican Party.

Wikipedia is a good source for dates and facts from history. It should never, and I emphasize never, be used to explain why anything occurred.

[Sam_Stone]

You guys have it backwards. Business experience matters not because you run government like a business, or because you want a CEO to make government more efficient. Rather, you want someone who understands business to be in charge of the government, because government is responsible for regulating business. If the regulators don’t understand the pressures of business or the requirements for a business to be successful, they’re not likely to do a very good job when telling businesses how they must operate.

Too many government officials hand-wave away the real costs they impose on businesses with their constant stream of commandments. That opens them up to the argument that they don’t know what they are doing, and it would help if they actually had to try to meet a payroll with something other than taxpayer’s money.

For example, I don’t think the people who wrote the Obama Health Care plan had any kind of understanding of the real hardship the 1099 reporting requirements were. Hell, most of them are lawyers or finance people, so a few extra legal documents are no big deal. Most of them are also awash in assistants who take care of the details. Many of them have never been in the private sector at all.

They simply cannot relate to the small business owner who runs his own home renovation firm. Maybe he’s got five or six employees, and would like to hire a few more. His wife is his accountant. He’s got a lawyer who does a few hours of work a year helping to file his various business documents. Every time he goes to his lawyer or has to hire an accountant it’s frightening because they charge big bucks and what they do is so far out of his wheelhouse he feels like he has no control over the situation.

When a person like that reads about a new requirement that will force him to track every payment over $600 and file a form with the government, it terrifies him. His wife doesn’t have time to do it, and an accountant will cost him a fortune. His receipts are in a shoe box because he works 12 hour days and signs checks at a dozen places and never seems to have time to sort it all out. And doing paperwork is the thing he absolutely hates more than anything.

It’s a person like him who sees the constant legislative changes coming out of Washington, and the constant threats of more legislation, who can’t make total sense out of it and doesn’t really know what it will do to his business, who winds up shrinking back and hunkering down instead of confidently expanding and hiring new people. And it’s people like him who are responsible for most of the new jobs created in the U.S.

It would be nice to have people in government who understand what it’s like to be that small proprietor - who understand it in their bones, from having lived the life. And it would be nice to have some who took a small business like that and grew it into a major firm, and understands what that takes and how government can throw wrenches into the works.

[Chronos]

Except that nobody in either party ever runs small businessmen as candidates. It’s always folks who headed up nationwide corporations. The CEO of a big business doesn’t understand the mom-and-pop level any better than does a politician: He’s got people to understand all those details for him.

[Voyager]

@Sam_Stone

You guys have it backwards. Business experience matters not because you run government like a business, or because you want a CEO to make government more efficient. Rather, you want someone who understands business to be in charge of the government, because government is responsible for regulating business. If the regulators don’t understand the pressures of business or the requirements for a business to be successful, they’re not likely to do a very good job when telling businesses how they must operate.

Then get people from business running the regulatory agencies. Which is also a good idea because they may know the tricks and where the rats are hiding. Let people with government experience, from the bottom up, run the government.
We have a lot fewer unqualified people from government running businesses than unqualified people from the outside trying to run government - and the Governator is jut one excellent example. Meg would have been another - even she now recognizes that the people of California figured out that electing inexperienced but charismatic people didn’t work out too well.

[suranyi]

@Sam_Stone

You guys have it backwards. Business experience matters not because you run government like a business, or because you want a CEO to make government more efficient. Rather, you want someone who understands business to be in charge of the government, because government is responsible for regulating business. If the regulators don’t understand the pressures of business or the requirements for a business to be successful, they’re not likely to do a very good job when telling businesses how they must operate.

But you could say this about everything, because the goverment regulates everything:

“You want someone who was in the Army, because the government is in charge of the military.”

“You want someone who was a teacher, because the government is in charge of education.”

“You want someone who was a lawyer/prosecutor/prison guard, because the goverment is in charge of creating criminal law.”

It’s good to have mix of different kinds of experience.

[Absolute]

The entire country operates on money that the private sector earns. Even the government is funded almost entirely by taxes on that money (either by taxing it directly, or by taxing money that businesses pay to their employees).

It makes perfect sense to me that you want someone who understands the needs of the private sector in office. If you want the government to spend $XX billion on something, you need to either raise taxes, or figure out how to increase private sector revenue such that you collect $XX billion extra in taxes at the unchanged rate.

Some Republicans truly believe that the last option is superior to the first, for everyone involved. And someone with private sector experience is best-equipped to make that happen. Others are just greedy corrupt bastards, of course.