I think I may need some help understanding something. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe my reading comprehension level has dropped due to reading too much DU. I stumbled across the transcripts of Chris Wallace's show from a couple of weeks back with Congress Paul Ryan and Austan Goolsbee who is one of 0's guys. The link is here:
FoxNewsDuring the discussion on Wallace's show they were talking about Romney's time as governor. From what I've been able to find, Romney was governor of Mass from 2003 to 2007. This was during W's time as president.
My questions concern the below quote by Goolsbee and the portions that I've bolded.
GOOLSBEE: Well, number one, the record as you indicated in the last question, clearly shows the Romney approach is not the correct approach. The nation was in a boom. Massachusetts was doing worst in all of the states in terms of job creation. The reason you saw jobs growing is because government jobs were rising six times faster than the national rate in Massachusetts.
There is a reason why when Governor Romney stepped down from office, he had a 36 percent approval rating by the people in his own state and that was during a boom. I believe that the reason that the Obama approach is better, it is not -- absolutely not a government-directed approach. That's not correct. The president passed hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts for business, for individuals, for workers.
He believes that the main driver of the economy is the middle class. It is not high income people. The Romney budget is premised on the view that absolutely premised the George Bush budget in 2000, and that is if we cut high income people's taxes by hundreds of billions and go try to crush Social Security and Medicare, we try to reduce -- as the Romney budget would -- discretionary spending, all the training, all the infrastructure, all the education, all the law enforcement, we try to get it down to 5 percent of the economy which is by far the lowest of any advanced country and the lowest it has been in almost a century in this country, that somehow that will unleash the forces of growth.
But all I would ask you to do is look at 2000 and explain to me how then it worked then. If that was a magic elixir, why did we not have phenomenal growth?
Is 0's guy admitting that things were good (or booming) during W's time in office? Does he catch himself at the end of the quote and fall back to their standard blame game?
