Sorry, Mitt, America Isn't a Business

Mitt Romney is running on the premise that America needs a successful businessman to become CEO and turn it around. There's a glaring flaw in that argument, writes Paul Krugman of the New York Times: "America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits." The economy is more complex than even the largest multi-national corporation, and it functions differently. Corporations sell products to others; America sells products to itself.

Consider "ruthless cost-cutting." For company owners (if not workers), every dollar saved is a dollar earned. But in an economy, slashes in government spending hit domestic producers, and in turn eliminate jobs. Krugman isn't sure Romney understands that, and "we're not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America." (More Mitt Romney stories.)