Archive for October, 2012
Low-wage, part-time Staples jobs are Romney’s go-to example of job creation ‘success’
Low-wage, part-time Staples jobs are Romney’s go-to example of job creation ‘success’
Mitt Romney’s America…
Mitt Romney often champions the success of retail chain Staples as one of his main qualifications for the presidency. Here are some facts about the nearly 90,000 jobs Romney likes to say he helped create at Staples:
- 41 percent are part-time jobs.
- Hourly wages for sales associates are less than $9 an hour.
- Retail salespeople make about $20,670 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is lower than the federal poverty line for a family of four.
- Staples describes its own workforce this way: “Many of our associates, particularly in retail stores, are in entry-level or part-time positions with historically high rates of turnover.”
- Staples has been listed by the National Employment Law Project as one of the 50 largest low-wage employers in the country.
- In 1987, a year after Staples was founded, there were 13,347 office supply stores across the country. Ten years later that number was cut in half, to just 6,178 office supply stores.
- When Staples was founded in 1986, the market share of small and medium-sized sellers of office supplies was 20 percent. By 1998, it had plunged to just four percent.
- The market share of large superstores, meanwhile, shot up from less than one percent to 20 percent during that same period.
Read more about Romney’s job creation record at Staples — including our interview with Staples founder Tom Stemberg — on our website.
Mitt Romney turns the screws
Mitt Romney’s strength is often touted as a business expert, who works wonders and is a efficiency expert. But really his expertise can be boiled down to just one idea: cut costs. This is his solution for every problem that exists in business and government. Pay less for things, do it cheaper, pay workers less, get lower rents, and so on.
Having run a business, I can say that it is obvious that cost control is really important. Don’t pay more than you need to, don’t pay for things you don’t need, and watch the overhead. While this is all true, this totally neglects the fact that increasing revenue is just as important if not more important than cutting costs.
Once you are buying your office supplies cheaply, paying as low a rent as possible, and you negotiate the best deals with suppliers, you’ve cut almost as much as you can. Then what?
Lets take the example of a pizza shop. If a pizza costs $2.00 to make, and you sell them for $12.00, that is a profit of $10.00 per pizza. Business expert Mitt Romney would come in and say, use less cheese, buy cheaper ingredients, pay your workers less, get cheaper insurance, etc. After all of this, the cost per pizza goes down to $1.00, and the profit goes up to $11.00.
The failure in this logic, when applied to business and government, is that this approach never factors in the value of increasing revenue! Using the example above, instead of cutting all of the corners to make an extra dollar, why not just sell one more pizza? That increases revenue, increases profit, and increases your business. Growth is important in business, not just cost controls.
But in Mitt Romney, and the Right Wing’s single minded focus on debt and costs, no growth can ever be planned for. Sure one way to increase the bottom line is cutting things, but that has a diminishing return which eventually bottoms out. Then what? Usually for Mitt Romney, at that point he gets paid, and moves on to another company to sell them his same cut costs snake oil.
A real way to grow a business involves investing, putting money in to receive a return. If the business has growth potential, it needs capital and investment to expand. This leads to growth, higher revenue, and potentially higher profits.
It is fitting that Mitt Romney would bring this same prescription to government, if elected President of the U.S. He and Paul Ryan and a Republican Congress would try to cut their way to balance, but their cuts are so extreme that the possibility of growth in the future would be destroyed. Revenues would never increase, and we would see years of stagnant and almost nonexistent growth.
Romney’s entire analysis of government deficits and social insurance programs overlooks one simple fact: the main driver of deficits and increased costs of insurance programs is unemployment. In order to reduce tax deficits, more unemployment needs to get lower through job creation. With lower unemployment comes increased revenue from taxes. The same is true of other programs. With more people working, there are less people needing benefits from medicare, medicaid, and other programs.
We cannot cut our way to solvency, nor should we. One trick pony Mitt Romney might think we can, and if he wins, he will try, but it will not work. And unlike in private industry, there is no other country to move on to after he ruins this one.
CA institutes private savings fund law
CA institutes private savings fund law
Savings accounts for workers seem like a good idea. Can’t other states do this as well?
Romney did not win the debate
This past week, the media narrative has been that Mitt Romney won the first debate against Barack Obama. Obama did not perform well, but anyone who has watched his previous performances in debates should know, this is how he is in debates.
Anyone saying that Romney won, seriously needs to re-watch the debate. Romney agreed that he wanted to privatize Medicare with a voucher system. Romney agreed that he would not want any raising of taxes, only a complicated system that will somehow shift the tax burden without raising taxes which he will not explain and sounds insane. Romney said he wanted to fire the moderator, and cut Big Bird Loose.
Obama essentially made no news. When you have the lead, no news is good news.
In this “Debate” Obama went in with a clear strategy: lets take a few pitches, see what this guy has, use the information for my later at-bats. Much like baseball, the Presidential Election is a marathon, and this debate was basically one At-Bat.
Yes, Obama could have destroyed Romney if he wanted to. Yes, Jim Leher was one of the worst moderators that has every moderated a presidential debate, and needs to go back into retirement. Yes, the debate format sucked, and did not cover many parts of domestic policy?
How does this add up to a Romney win? Is it because he lied at almost every opportunity, shaded the truth, flip flopped on many current positions, and did it without looking like a total and complete idiot?
Romney did not win the debate. To quote Reverend Al Sharpton on the post debate coverage, “He gave great testimony, but he committed perjury.” Perjury is a crime that always catches up with public officials, and this one will catch up with Romney.
Up With Chris: After his bank lost nearly $6 billion from possibly fraudulent trading activity, Jamie Dimon got a pep talk from NFL…
Wall Street’s titans have protested breathlessly since 2008 that they’ve been unfairly demonized and scapegoated for the reckless behavior that nearly brought down the financial industry and plunged the economy into recession. Apparently, their feelings are easily bruised.
Now, Vanity Fair …
This about sums up the Patriots.