Last night Mitt Romney handed his opponents a nice twofer – a classically weird meme-ready phrase, used in the service of a lie about his record as Governor.
What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.
They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.
I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I’ve checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I’ve just presented it is correct — and that Romney’s claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.
I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about — budget, business development, etc. — went to women.
Oh look, A123 Battery filed bankruptcy today. Another $249 million in taxpayer money flushed.
#trolling
Nah, just making sure you knew.
It’s what happens when academics make investment decisions with no real world experience to fall back on. They lose.
Private investors make bad investments too. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be subsidizing battery R&D.
Private investors with Obama’s track record are not investors, they’re FORMER investors.
I know government should take more risk, but these guys are beyond awful. Example – no one wanted Solyndra except Obama and Biden – bang, there goes $500 million. A123 picked up $250M from the Feds and $125M from the state of Michigan before going under, and had lost over $1 billion since its founding. Oh, and the feds put $529M into Fiske Automotive to try to create a market for A123′s batteries. We’ll see what happens with that and whether Johnson Controls can make anything work out of A123′s operations.
Make sense now? This is bad, they’re making large bets with our money and they’re losing very often.
I am pretty sure that the program anticipated losses of nearly 4-times what has gone belly up thus far. Now, I know that that fact won’t make you happy. But, I have to assume there were some fairly smart actuaries who are able to calculate loss vs. reward in standard ways and we are still coming in below the loss threshold, so, you know, not a huge deal. It is the cost of innovation. It put people to work. It spurred demand in in other areas of the economy. It is hard to say things are good or bad in areas like this.
If the program anticipated losses that high it should never have been done. Investment is good, but flushing money at this rate is insanity.
This is what happens when bureaucrats pick “winners.” Instead, we need to drive innovation through the tax code and not by direct investment.
Example – make private investments in A123 exempt from capital gains taxes.
Let the market decide what has merit and potential instead of politicians and bureaucrats. More will be accomplished and it won’t cost the taxpayer nearly as much as these programs do.