While discussing President Obama's remarks on Romney's experience at Bain Capital, former Reagan Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman stepped all over Romney's claims that his experience in the leveraged buyout business taught him anything at all about "job creation."
Here's what President Obama said earlier this week, which they opened up with in the segment from Fox Business Channel's After the Bell in the clip above: Obama On Romney’s Bain Experience: The President’s Job ‘Is Not Simply To Maximize Profits’:
During a press conference Monday afternoon, President Obama hit back against critics — including surrogate and Newark Mayor Cory Booker — who have expressed disappointment over his campaign’s effort to attack Mitt Romney’s record of job creation at Bain Capital, a leveraged buyout firm the former Massachusetts governor headed from 1984 to 1999.
“The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president, is his business experience,” Obama said. “He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying, ‘I’m a business guy, I know how to fix it.’” Obama explained that while private equity is “set up to maximize profits” for shareholders, the president is responsible for the health of the economy as a whole and fostering job creation.
Much to the chagrin of the two anchors on Fox Business, Stockman went off message when he responded to Asman's question about whose economic model the public is going to support:
ASMAN: So you have these two economic models. You have one exemplified by Bain Capital, which fails sometimes, but I think it has a success rate of about 70 percent and you have one of the federal government involvement in the economy. Which one do you think the American public is going to support?
STOCKMAN: Well, I don't know. I think the current federal model is a disaster. We know where we are on the debt. We're going to have a debt ceiling that expires in December and I don't know where the votes are going to come to increase it. But if they don't, then we'll have this huge sequester and we'll have all these tax cuts expiring. It is going to be really a thundering mess. So clearly what we're doing with fiscal policy and monetary policy at present, isn't working.
On the other hand, I don’t think Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits.
Cue David Asman and his co-host Melissa Francis heads simultaneously exploding at the same time.
ASMAN: But hold on David, he had so many new jobs created for all the jobs that were lost, it was a net gain, no?
STOCKMAN: I don’t think so. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal that, you know, they got out of long before it got to its current size. You know, the LBO business is legitimate, free enterprise business, just like, you know, running a brothel if that's what you want to do, or a house of gambling.
FRANCIS: Nooooo...
STOCKMAN: But it's not a good model for how we rebuild an economy or grow jobs. It's irrelevant.
