I don’t know who’s writing Romney’s speeches, but they really haven’t thought this one through. Particularly, I think the following quote is nothing short of asinine: ““If you look at his record of the last three-and-a-half years you will conclude, as I have, that it is the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of policies in modern American history.”

For starters, Obama has lowered taxes and extended the Bush Tax Cuts.  (You might recall that it was Republicans who went against their own platform in opposing tax cuts for wage earners.) The stimulus also contained several tax cuts to obtain Republican votes, which economists argued at the time would burden the stimulus and blunt its effectiveness.  (And the economists were right.)

Secondly, domestic energy production is at its highest level in the history of the nation.  The only argument one could make against Obama’s energy policy is the delay of the Keystone Pipeline, but the fact is that there have been more than a dozen leaks in the portion of the pipeline that does exist, so it’s pretty reasonable for Obama and the Democrats to call for more study before final approval can take place. Several of the states where the proposed pipeline would run have also opposed it due to the potential negative environmental impacts on agriculture, and those states have representation in the Federal Government opposing it as well. 

Finally, look at the market conditions and jobs data for when Obama took office (as well as corporate profits) and what they are now.  (I’ll give you a hint, jobs are substantially up from when Obama took office.) One has to ignore a significant portion of economic data to conclude that Obama’s policies have been bad for business.  (And conversely, look at the jobs data and market conditions in Europe, which went with the austerity policies that Republicans and Romney are advocating.) Romney’s speech reminds me of the Jamie Dimon complaining about bank regulations that he asserted would cost 600 million, and now he’s sweating in front of a government committee for losing multiple billions of dollars of clients’ money. Wall Street wants the deregulation that existed prior to 2008, and at this point, we’ve seen enough to know that advocating for that deregulation is pretty willfully ignorant. 

The only real straw that Romney has to grasp at is that Democrats haven’t fixed the Bush Recession quickly enough, but given that we can look at Europe and see how destructive Romney’s and the Republicans’ plans are, I’ll vote for Obama if it’s based on economic plans alone.