Lately, Mitt Romney has been running on a platform that attacks President Obama for the decision, in the midst of the financial crisis, to come to the rescue of the big auto companies in Michigan in order to save jobs. The aid worked: those companies have kept workers on and the auto industry is now expanding again. But Romney wants to win kudos from his right-wing supporters, and so has to appear to follow the party line that says that any government aide to business is per se bad because "the markets" should be "free" to handle everything.
Trouble is, Romney doesn't really believe that. If he did, he wouldn't have lobbied for, and accepted, various government handouts and low-priced loans for businesses owned by his private equity firm, Bain Capital. The fact that he found accepting taxpayer support for business a fine idea when it helped him make more personal profits suggests, like is flip-flopping on health care reform and other ideas, that Romney merely puts on the facade that he thinks will sell him best to a particular audience.
For information on the various kinds of government assistance Romney's firm sought and accepted, see Lee Fan, Romney relied on corporate welfare: how Bain capital leveraged government assistance to boost profits, Salon.com (Dec. 21, 2011) (discussing Staples and other businesses invested in by Bain).
Recent Comments