Romney's five-point plan to adress the specific aspects of our current jobs crisis recycles, nearly word for word, plans from far different economic times.

I've been watching the 2012 Republican National Convention, trying to get a sense of what the conservative diagnosis is for our weak economy and what they'd do in response. Is it the bizarro stimulus of raising interest rates, balancing the budget, and forcing foreclosures? Is there a secret housing plan? Or will it be a program of Reactionary Keynesianism, with an expanded military, massive tax cuts for the rich, and a SuperDuperCommittee to recommend tax expenditures that will go nowhere?

I take these arguments seriously -- I actually really enjoy making maps to help explore them. One argument worth bringing up is the idea that they are just proposing to do the policies they want all the time anyway -- the policies they wanted in 2008, or 2006, or 2004 -- but are pretending there's a reason it would be extra important given our current recession.

So on August 30th, 2012, with unemployment at 8.3 percent and with a serious long-term unemployment problem, Mitt Romney gives the RNC acceptance speech. He outlines a plan to create 12 million jobs in the next four years. As Jared Bernstein pointed out, that's what Moody's says will be created anyway. But forget that. How will Mitt Romney do this? He has a five point plan (numbers in [brackets] here and in the rest of the post are added by me):

And unlike the president, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has 5 steps.

[1] First, by 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables.

[2] Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.

[3] Third, we will make trade work for America by forging new trade agreements. And when nations cheat in trade, there will be unmistakable consequences.

[4] Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

[5] And fifth, we will champion SMALL businesses, America’s engine of job growth. That means reducing taxes on business, not raising them. It means simplifying and modernizing the regulations that hurt small business the most. And it means that we must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare.

So his plan focuses on domestic energy production, school choice, trade agreements, cutting spending, and reducing taxes and regulations. This must be a set of priorities reflecting our terrifying moment of mass unemployment, right?

Let's flash back to September 4th, 2008, at the RNC where John McCain is giving his speech accepting the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Unemployment is 6.1 percent, though the Great Moderation is coming to an end; within a year it'll be close to 10 percent. Two weeks later, as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, McCain would say "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." What were his recommendations for the economy in that nomination speech?

I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy, and it often sees that your government hasn't even noticed... That's going to change on my watch...

[3] I will open new markets to our goods and services. My opponent will close them...

[4] I will cut government spending. He will increase it...

[5] We all know that keeping taxes low helps small businesses grow and create new jobs...

[4] Reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs will let you keep more of your own money to save, spend, and invest as you see fit...

[2] Education -- education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained, but what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice...

[1] We'll attack -- we'll attack the problem on every front. We'll produce more energy at home.. Senator Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that.

It's the same exact agenda. Specifically, the Romney agenda for job creation in 2012 is stuff that John McCain wanted to do anyway in 2008.

Let's go back further. On September 2nd, 2004, George W. Bush is at the RNC, giving his speech accepting the nomination to run for a second term as President of the United States. Unemployment is 5.4 percent. A major housing bubble is kicking into high gear, and the country is debating the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the future of the War on Terror. A few months later, people will be talking about a permanent Republican majority. What are some priorities for a second George W. Bush term in creating jobs?

To create more jobs in America, America must be the best place in the world to do business.

[5] To create jobs, my plan will encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent.

[1] To create jobs, we will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

[3] To create jobs, we will expand trade and level the playing field to sell American goods and services across the globe.

[5] And we must protect small-business owners and workers from the explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across our country. Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess...

[4]  To be fair, there are some things my opponent is for. He's proposed more than $2 trillion in new federal spending so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts.

It's the same agenda, mentioned back to back almost in the same order. Bush mentioned No Child Left Behind several times, though I'm not sure if that matches up with the school choice of [2] in Romney's economic plan for school choice, so I excluded [2]. It's always time for cutting spending, more oil drilling, free trade, and lower taxes and regulation to fix the economy.

Let's do one last one. January 31st, 2006, George W. Bush is giving his State of the Union address. Unemployment is 4.7 percent. With the economy healthy and growing (in Bush's mind), now is the time to build on the strengths and address the weaknesses of the economy. What does he suggest?

Our economy is healthy and vigorous, and growing faster than other major industrialized nations...

[5] Because America needs more than a temporary expansion, we need more than temporary tax relief. I urge the Congress to act responsibly and make the tax cuts permanent.

[4] Keeping America competitive requires us to be good stewards of tax dollars. Every year of my presidency, we've reduced the growth of nonsecurity discretionary spending. And last year you passed bills that cut this spending.

[3] Keeping America competitive requires us to open more markets for all that Americans make and grow... With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out- produce or out-compete the American worker...

[1] Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

Again, President Bush mentions No Child Left Behind, but I'm not sure whether it overlaps with [2].

But the same exact playbook is there in 2006, as it was in 2004 and 2008, and as it is in 2012. Domestic oil production, school choice, trade agreements, cut spending and reduce taxes and regulations -- it's been the conservative answer to times of deep economic stress, times of economic recovery, times of economic worries, and times of economic panic. Which is another way of saying that the Republicans have no plan for how to actually deal with this specific crisis we face.

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Paul Ryan may have a reputation as a truth-teller, but his convention speech was far from the truth.

Honest? Intellectual? Neither quality was on display last night when Paul Ryan gave his first major national speech to America and provided red meat to his fellow Republican conventioneers. Profoundly sarcastic about Barack Obama, taking one rhetorical swing after another about how the administration failed, he promised in soaring language that Mitt Romney and he would do far better, put America back to work, and save Medicare. How? Not a word. No mention of a plan, not even in broad strokes.

Perhaps Ryan was told to leave the plan to Romney during his acceptance speech. But of course, neither Romney nor Ryan has told us much about their plan at all. They will cut taxes, but will they close the deficit they so deplore and blame on Obama? The CBO says Ryan’s plan won’t do that for decades, and even that forecast relies on spending cuts and the closing of tax loopholes neither Ryan nor Romney will specify. This is honesty?

At the very least, Ryan could have told us why he believes in small government, not simply that he believes in it. He could have tried to present some evidence, theory, or even conjecture about how it limits growth. He could have sought a historical example or two of a better America. Of course, this would have been difficult. The facts don’t back him up.

Ryan said Obama was trying to sail on “yesterday’s wind.” The Republican chant about making the poor personally responsible for their own good is truly “yesterday’s wind.” Before Social Security, when workers were largely “responsible” for their own retirement, about half the elderly lived below the poverty rate. American policymakers paid too little attention to poverty until Michael Harrington wrote his book, The Other America, documenting how many poor there were. In the 1950s, before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the poor had to get by on their own, as Republicans would have it today. The poverty rate then was 22 or 23 percent, but now America’s official poverty line is lower compared to median incomes than in most other rich countries.

If Ryan is what passes for intellectual in Republican circles, the party is in serious trouble. He is an ideologue. He espouses faith in a small government dogma, not theory or evidence. And we have heard this chorus for a century or two. Good thing the nation ignored it and built a set of social programs that were central to the development of a middle class -- civil rights for black people and women, free education, major transportation systems, and protection from workplace abuses, old age, and the scourge of being born into poverty.

As Ryan said about Obama, his facts are merely true because he states them. Last night, Ryan took two big cheap shots. He had the audacity to suggest Obama was to blame for an auto plant that GM closed before he took office, when in fact Romney was opposed to the Obama bailout of GM. And of course there was Obama's $700 billion “raid” on Medicare in order to provide coverage for others, mainly the poor and the young. Obama is cutting back reimbursements to providers and a subsidy for Medicare advantage. It won’t affect senior benefits. But the honest and intellectual Ryan did not explain this to us.

The Ryan charade is about to end. Ryan showed himself last night to be a politician willing to distort the facts and cynical enough about his audience’s intellectual capacity to provide no evidence, theory, or history to support his points even if he had them at his disposal. The Republicans’ rising star turned out to be a breath of stale air. 

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

Paul Ryan image via Shutterstock.com.

Beyond thinking Dodd-Frank generally was a bad bill, he's voted against most of its individual pieces.

The entirety of Romney's plan for financial reform in the wake of the 2008 crisis is contained in the following sentence: "Repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework." One might argue that this is vague enough to cause some of the dreaded economic policy uncertainty, but either way it is very unclear about what exactly financial regulation should involve.

This might change with Paul Ryan. Not only is Ryan well known for his wonky style, but he voted for TARP, the Wall Street bailout. He also went to the floor of the House and asked his fellow Republicans to vote for TARP. One would imagine he would think that the status quo is flawed if he had to vote for TARP to save the economy. Alas, Paul Ryan voted against the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the major financial regulatory response to the crisis.

(It might be worth noting that Public Citizen did an analysis that found that House members who voted for TARP and against Dodd-Frank, a club Paul Ryan belongs to and consists mostly of Republicans, received three times as much campaign money from the financial industry as those that voted the opposite in both cases. As Zach Carter pointed out in an analysis back in 2010, of the 60 Republican House members who voted for TARP and against Dodd-Frank, Paul Ryan received the ninth highest donation from the financial industry in 2010, with a haul of at least $531,500 for the year.)

So Paul Ryan is against Dodd-Frank as an overall bill. He also seeks to repeal it in his budget. But what does Ryan think of the individual parts of Dodd-Frank? One could be opposed to Dodd-Frank as a whole while still thinking individual parts are good ideas. In order to isolate that question, we can look at a series of Dodd-Frank amendments Ryan voted on, as well as subsequent actions and statements.

Consumer Protection: While the bill that became Dodd-Frank was going through the House, Ryan voted to scrap the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and replace it with a plan proposed by the Chamber of Commerce. Right before Dodd-Frank came up for a vote in the House, there was an amendment proposed by Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID) to replace the CFPA with a council of existing regulators. According to reports from the time, this was modeled off suggestions from the Chamber of Commerce. The amendment failed, though Paul Ryan voted for it. Beyond concerns of accountability or funding of the CFPB, Paul Ryan would likely rather see the entire thing go.

Derivatives Regulation: Part of Dodd-Frank requires that derivative contracts trade through a clearinghouse. We don't have a clear vote from Ryan that shows what he thought of derivatives at the time, but he did vote against the Lynch amendment. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) proposed a simple amendment stating that a financial firm can't own more than 20 percent of a derivatives clearinghouse to prevent conflicts of interest. Later, Ryan also voted to delay the implementation of derivative regulations for one year in June 2011, signaling he doesn't approve of the aggressive derivatives reforms people like Gensler are championing at the CFTC. This contrasts him sharply with someone like John Hunstman, who had very strong derivatives reform as part of his broad, serious financial reform ideas during the Republican primary.

Resolution Authority: Ryan voted for the repeal of resolution authority -- indeed, he sponsored the legsliation to repeal it. Resolution authority, or orderly liquidation authority, is a new set of legal abilities that allow the FDIC to take over and wind down a failing financial firm. When Barney Frank says that his bill actually has a death panel in it, he's referring to this part.

We can get a bit specific with why Ryan likely did this. In his Path to Prosperity, Ryan makes two points in argument against resolution authority. The first is that it "intensifies the problem of too-big-to-fail by giving large, interconnected financial institutions advantages that small firms will not enjoy." As Barney Frank and others point out, there's not evidence that banks are actively seeking to be designated as systemically risky. The general read is that business are going out of their way to avoid that designation, even restructuring away from risky activities. Which is the point.

The second critique is that "Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) now has the authority to access taxpayer dollars in order to bail out the creditors" and will presumably use it, preserving Too Big to Fail. Depending on who is talking, this usually refers to either the FDIC’s ability to provide “an immediate source of liquidity for an orderly liquidation, which allows continuation of essential functions and maintains asset values” or its ability to repay creditors.

Dodd-Frank requires that the FDIC's responsibilities include ensuring "that unsecured creditors bear losses in accordance with the priority of claim,” that shareholders receive nothing "until after all other claims and the Fund are fully paid" and that any losses remaining afterward that could impact Treasury are repaid through assesments on systemically risky financial institutions. In order to avoid situations like AIG, the FDIC is explicitly prohibited from taking "an equity interest in or become a shareholder of any covered financial company or any covered subsidiary" during resolution. Management has to be fired. Taxpayer money is recouped and bailouts avoided.

Title II is built to avoid looking like a bailout, self-consciously so. If the critique is about the powers to differentiate payments, those powers, as Douglas G. Baird and Edward R. Morrison noted about the powers, look like critical vendor orders or other parts of bankruptcy powers. By all accounts the FDIC rules are being written in this manner.

Bankruptcy: Speaking at a town hall, Ryan has seemingly proposed modifying the bankruptcy code, perhaps in line with plans from the Hoover Institute, in order to handle financial firms. (He also seemed to endorse the Volcker Rule in that town hall, but I haven't seen that from him anywhere else.) This would mean the FDIC would lose the special powers it has been given, which are believed to be important for resolution, including advance planning and living wills, debtor-in-possession financing and liquidity, making payments to creditors based on expected recoveries, keeping operations running, having graduated regulations based on size and riskiness, the ability to transfer qualified financial contracts without termination, and the ability to turn up or down regulations going into a potential resolution based on prompt corrective action. If that is the plan, and those powers are unnecessary to tackle TBTF, Ryan should spell it out more clearly.

At the same time, Ryan has proposed policies that were already in or based on Dodd-Frank. He has told CNBC and Ezra Klein that he was interested in using Luigi Zingales' approach to taking down a financial firm as outlined in a National Affairs article. This approach uses credit default swap measures, a financial derivative designed to gauge the risk of collapse, to judge when to take a financial firm into an orderly liquidation.

As I noted at the time, this is a form of resolution authority. It is specifically a form of prompt corrective action, which requires regulators to go ahead and collapse a firm based on market signals instead of regulator judgement. For it to work, you'd need legal powers to carry out a resolution, which Ryan has voted against, as well as sufficient regulation of dervatives to make sure the price signal is clear, which Ryan also voted against. And it seems to stand in contrast to the bankruptcy approach he has talked about elsewhere.

At this point there are some allusions to specifics in what Ryan talks about when it comes to taking down a large financial firm, though it often contradicts itself. But he hasn't offered anything specific on derivatives, consumer financial protection, insurance, securitization, ratings agencies, and the shadow-banking industry more broadly -- all of which would be up for grabs if Dodd-Frank was repealed under the Path to Prosperity.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

Mitt Romney aired an ad last summer titled "Bump in the Road." It attacked President Obama's record on mass unemployment by linking it to a comment he made about there being bumps in the road to economic recovery. A group of people stood on a road in a desert, holding signs explaining their years of unemployment, their student debts, and their struggling families (something not dissimilar to the We Are the 99% Tumblr that started later that year). They pointed to the real suffering that goes on beyond numerical aggregates like the unemployment rate.

I remember this ad, because I remember several liberals being worried about this type of Romney campaign. Why? Because the liberals in question basically agreed with it. President Obama was trying to make a Grand Bargain with unemployment above 9 percent. The weak recovery was accepted as a given by the administration instead of the problem that had to be tackled. There was a lot of debate over what could be done and how, but at that point unemployment was off the table. President Obama would pivot back to jobs that fall, but it would remain a quiet priority, especially after so much time had been wasted. And it was a worry that if Mitt Romney ran a campaign that was all about unemployment all the time, President Obama would lose. I thought this was correct at the time.

That has changed with Paul Ryan now announced as Romney's vice presidential running mate. This appears to signal that the Romney campaign will move away from the previous focus on unemployment towards arguing for the conservative transformation of the federal government and the social safety net. This move is being interpreted as a sign of weakness from the campaign, one where they are worried that their previous strategy was failing. But why was the unemployment message failing? The economy isn't much stronger, so it hasn't lost its potency. Mitt Romney's job creation record was being attacked, but that only gets you so far. I think a major reason why is because of an odd contradiction one can see from the recent "Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs" released by Romney's economics team. Romney has no actual interest in trying to bring unemployment down faster, which blunts the ability to really say anything about unemployment, but his economics team also wasn't signing off on the far-right's bizarro stimulus plans.

There's already been a lot written on how the paper distorts the research it cites. The paper claims to "speed up the recovery in the short run." How? "By changing course from the policies of the current administration and ending economic uncertainty." What are the bold policies to help those unemployed people President Obama ignored? Tax code reform, block-granting Medicaid, and repealing Dodd-Frank and Obamacare while making "cost-benefit analysis important features of regulation."

Which is to say that Romney wanted to focus on unemployment, but had no real serious plan on how to get unemployed people jobs. I can, quickly, come up with a set of conservative stimulus ideas on how to get the economy going again, but the wide range of these programs are missing from Romney's economics report. They aren't going to hire market monetarists to run the Federal Reserve. Mitt Romney just publicly said the Federal Reserve shouldn't go ahead with another round of quantitive easing [1]. There isn't the argument that the government should just not collect taxes for a year or two with borrowing costs so low, which will also make it that much harder to raise taxes to Clinton-era rates afterwards. There's nothing in the paper about housing, even though one of Romney's advisors is well known for his mass refinancing program to help boost demand. And there's no conditional lending to states to prevent layoffs on the condition that they dismantle public sector unions, or privatize certain government services, or whatever.

Ideas have consequences, and the fact that Romney has no actual ideas for how to get the unemployed jobs means that making unemployment a big issue is only going to have so much traction with the electorate. "The long-term unemployed should vote for me so I can go after financial regulations," or "Vote for me, because I'll just ignore mass unemployment outright rather than not do enough and then pivot away" aren't political strategies that capitalize on the big vunerability Obama has on economic weakness.

Given the number of policy entrepreneurs on the right, it's almost shocking how little effort I've seen to get creative with getting unemployment down. The policy for unemployment is just a set of conservative reforms conservatives would want to see anyway regardless of the economy. And the general message seems to be that unemployment is unfortunate, but the downside risks of trying to combat it are far too high. Better to just get through this period and focus on the long-term economy. The unemployed are, in fact, just bumps in the road.

But the Romney Program document is interesting because it avoids embracing something I'll call "bizarro stimulus." These are arguments that doing things traditionally thought of as the opposite of economic stimulus will be the real stimulus and help bring unemployment down. Romney's economics team doesn't seem to want to go in that direction, yet that is the direction of the House Republicans and of Paul Ryan.

Many economists believe that the Federal Reserve should lower rates, but that a "zero lower bound" holds conventional monetary policy in check. The debate is whether and how unconventional monetary policy can help. In bizarro stimulus, the problem is that the rate is at zero. If you were to raise that rate, you would get capital going again. Here's Paul Ryan from Summer 2010, arguing that "I think literally that if we raised the federal funds rate by a point, it would help push money into the economy, as right now, the safest play is to stay with the federal money and federal paper." This is usually thought of as incorrect by most economists, but that's why it is bizarro stimulus. Ryan has also promoted bills to drop the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, even though the problem is the Federal Reserve not taking its dual mandate seriously enough.

When the economy is weak and we are far away from full employment, we should run a larger deficit in order to boost demand. Austerity and the slashing of government spending will actually make the economy worse in these times. Unless you are in bizarro economics, under which austerity can expand the economy. David Brook wrote back in 2010, in an article called "Prune and Grow," that “Alberto Alesina of Harvard has surveyed the history of debt reduction. He’s found that, in many cases, large and decisive deficit reduction policies were followed by increases in growth, not recessions.” Though this research has many serious problems, it became part of the core of the new conservatives in the House, a group Paul Ryan is influential with. Republicans' economic policy in 2011 was all about expansionary austerity, with their JEC report making several references to the possibility of austerity being offset by confidence and certainty. Romney actually pointed out the absurdity of expansionary austerity back in May of this year, noting "I don’t want to have us go into a recession in order to balance the budget." Nobody could tell if Romney was going off message with that statement.

It's interesting that Romney's advisors don't touch either of these ideas, yet they are an important part of how the House Republicans approach the economy. Will the Ryan pick also signal that Romney will move much further to the right on economic issues? We've rarely ever had to ask if a presidential candidate agrees with the views of his vice-presidential running mate, rather than the other way around, but that is now a relevant question.

[1] Can you imagine the debate and coverage that would happen if President Obama encouraged Bernanke to move with QE3? Yet Mitt Romney calling out against QE3 doesn't get noticed, and certainly isn't thought of as "politicizing the Federal Reserve," even though it obviously is.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog: