What America Needs to Compete

In response to President Obama’s answer to the October 22, 2012 question – what is America’s role in the world- Mitt Romney said he has a policy and an agenda for the future and a plan to create 12 million new jobs and increase take home pay; what we’ve seen over the last 4 years he doesn’t want to see over the next 4 years and he repeated his 5 step plan stating you can’t get companies to invest in America if they think we’re headed on the road to Greece.

Obama said – let’s talk about what we need to compete; when Romney was Governor of Massachusetts (MA) small business development ranked 48 out of the 50 states because his policies don’t help small business and small business to Romney includes large business; Obama went on to what he’s done to reform education; he said Romney disagrees that hiring more teachers and having smaller classrooms makes a difference; Obama believes having a skilled workforce will bring jobs to the US; he said not asking for the rich to pay more and slashing education undermines our position in the world and the world notices. Bob Schieffer, the moderator, tried to get things back on track but Romney said he needed a moment and went on to say -  he said he’s proud of his education record in MA, when he was Governor the 4^th and 8^th grades came out first in the country in English and Math because they had better teachers. This led to bantering back and forth and I’m not going into it because I addressed this issue earlier. Schieffer interrupted them and went on to the next question.  

I do find it interesting that Romney brought up just 2 years of the education system so his statements are probably true. However, trying to fact check Romney’s MA small business record is almost impossible – it seems all sites are either pro or anti Romney. A pro Romney site did say Obama has an ad that claims Romney “left the state $2.6 billion deeper in debt”; it’s true that long-term bond debt, for capital improvements, rose under Romney. I guess who holds the bond is more important than the bonds themselves as Romney continually has knocked Obama for the bonds that China holds.