Give Mitt the Business

(Flickr/Gage Skidmore)As Mitt Romney tromps through Iowa and New Hampshire attempting to win the hearts of Republican voters, he'll be telling them that his career as a successful management consultant makes him the best prepared person to improve the American economy. Seeing as this will be the centerpiece of his campaign, it might be a good idea for reporters to start asking some detailed questions about it. I'm not talking about investigating Romney's business career (though there will certainly be some of that). I mean insisting that he explain in precise terms what his business experience will allow him to accomplish that other candidates can't. Because if you look at what Romney advocates on the economy, it seems to be pretty much the same recipe as every other Republican. Step 1: Cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Step 2: Cut some more taxes. Step 3: How do tax cuts sound?Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but the point is that we'll all be pretty shocked if there's any difference between what Romney and any of the other candidates propose on economic issues. But the idea that businesspeople have some kind of secret economic knowledge that they can apply directly to government is often repeated and rarely questioned. During the 2010 campaign, I wrote about this topic with regard to Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who were making the same claim Romney is now about their business experience, and it's worth repeating:

The next part of Whitman's claim is that business people "know how to create jobs." This might seem obvious, but is it, really? A businessperson creates jobs by selling a product or service at a profit, then growing her company to require the hiring of more people. All well and good -- but it has almost nothing to do with the rather limited range of things a politician can do to create jobs. The knowledge you gain in business could certainly be a help in understanding some of the issues around job creation, but it won't help you much at all if you can't do things like build coalitions to pass legislation.

Whitman's next claim was that businesspeople know how to "balance budgets." But a business' budget and a government's budget are profoundly different animals. Balancing the federal or state budget isn't just a matter of technical expertise, where you need someone with a head for numbers to go carefully through a spreadsheet. It involves highly ideological battles over spending and taxation. Is Whitman's experience in generating profits at eBay going to enable her to get Californians to go along with huge education cuts? I doubt it. Balancing government budgets isn't an accounting problem, it's a political problem -- which makes it infinitely more complicated.

Maybe Romney will have great answers to the question of what exactly his business experience will bring to government, beyond a bunch of vague bromides like "I know how the economy works." But he ought to be asked.