Foot in Momney

A day after being roundly lambasted for trying to take political advantage of the death of the American ambassador to Libya (along with several others) and then caught on camera smirking as he left the press conference, Mitt Romney said the ‘middle income’ bracket in the USA is around the $200,000 - $250,000 per annum mark, when in fact average earnings are roughly $39,000 p.a. How out of touch can one be? It’s no wonder that his campaign manager said that the Romney team were not going to care what fact-checkers uncovered.


But what really struck me in the interview he gave was how he used Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chief. Trying to contrast Barack Obama’s ‘view’ that the economy was improving, with Bernanke’s decision for another round of quantitative easing i.e increasing the money supply by printing faster than the replacement rate (a sign to Romney that the economy was not recovering), he ended up implicitly endorsing Obama. He criticised Bernanke (a Republican pick in 2006) for the QE and said he would most likely replace him were he to become president. So, if one places so little faith in the competence of the Federal Reserve Chairman, why use him as an economic pointer on Obama’s ‘failed’ policies? It is truly moronic. What were the voters of Massachusetts thinking when they elected him governor?