Ann Romney Lies About Unemployment: Mitt Failed

I really had problems stomaching the Republican National Convention last night. I guess having studied Mitt Romney for many months, the Republicans proved they had no integrity even putting Ann Romney on stage to push the lies. In her speech, Ann Romney says Mitt Romney doesn't fail. She then went on to say how Mitt lowered unemployment in Massachusetts.

While the average American is going to sit there and think this Mitt guy sounds great, the truth to this is Mitt Romney had his own big government spending stimulus plan just like Barack Obama. It didn't produce jobs like Ann Romney claims. In fact, like Obama's stimulus, unemployment went up. Like Obama, Mitt Romney believed government could create jobs.

From Salon:

As governor, Romney proposed more than $700 million in economic stimulus in a pair of packages over three years to right a sickly state economy that shed thousands of jobs before he took office, including offering to hand employers $30,000 for each worker they hired, even though he now bashes his Republican and Democratic foes over wasteful government spending.

As he stumps in Michigan, experts say this is yet another example of how Romney’s moderate governing style clashes with his conservative campaign attacks against Republican and Democratic rivals, amplifying Romney’s image as a candidate without a core.

“This has been his greatest vulnerability,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University political scientist. “He looks like a guy who’ll say anything to win, and it’s a problem.”

Romney, like Obama, inherited a disaster. By the time he took office in January 2003, the Massachusetts unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent from 5.3 percent a year earlier, and 66,000 fewer people had jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And his Republican predecessor left him a $3 billion budget deficit.

That year, Romney balanced the budget with Democrats by cutting spending and raising fees without hiking taxes (although some critics argued the fees amounted to tax hikes).

Romney’s first stimulus proposal in 2003 was a relatively narrow $125 million one. Eventually, Romney and the Democrats agreed on a $100 million version with tax credits and grants to promote the high technology industry. But the governor vetoed workforce training grants used to upgrade workers’ skills.

Two years later, Romney was eyeing a presidential bid, and job creation stubbornly lagged (Massachusetts would place 47thin the nation in job creation under Romney according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies). This time, the governor went big. In February 2005, Romney unveiled a sweeping $600 million stimulus package to kick-start the economy and create 20,000 jobs over five years.

Oh and it gets better. Remember how Obama's stimulus had funding for transportation projects like highways and high-speed rail...

The biggest big-ticket item was $300 million in bonds diverted for transportation projects, some of the money going straight to private companies’ infrastructure improvements. He’d also put about $250 million back into employers’ pockets but let them skip tax payments to the state’s jobless benefits fund for a year – this was controversial, since the fund was just beginning to build itself back up after the recession.

Most controversial: Romney wanted to spend $37 million to create new jobs by offering employers $30,000 for each new person they hired.

As a side note, Mitt Romney's Massachusetts stimulus also had green energy initiatives like the Obama stimulus. Like Obama's stimulus, those green energy companies failed.