The Bain Record and fair coverage

Much has been made in the last two weeks about jobs that were lost at some of the companies in which Bain Capital invested while Mitt Romney was a partner in that firm. Most of the discussion is assinine; anyone who owns businesses necessarily comes to a point where jobs are lost. Not all investments work. Indeed, profits are in many ways the reward to the investor who risks his money while knowing that he could lose it all. Jobs are the result of successful investing.

I do not want to go through the entire justification here, however. There is no point to doing so. Nor do I want to take up Romney's own statements about how Obama laid tens of thousands of people off at GM and Chrysler and forced many thousands of car dealerships out of business. It is not the same thing as what Bain did, since Obama put the government into the middle of the economy and Bain did not.

No, today, I just want to point out one simple fact: we should not calculate how many jobs were created or lost by Bain. Instead, we should use the Obama calculus here. How many jobs were "created or saved" by what Bain did? Obama counted imaginary "saved" jobs as a justification for the stimulus. No one could tell which jobs, if any, were saved due to the Stimulus Bill, but the press obediently reported the "fact" of millions of "saved" jobs even without any proof. After all, it made Obama look good. For Bain Capital, however, there is no question about saving jobs. Most of the companies in which Bain invested were on the verge of going under. But for the Bain investments, all of those employed at these companies would have lost their jobs. In other words, if Bain invested in a company that employed 5000 people and, in order to make it profitable, laid off 1000 people, that is 4000 jobs saved. These are not mythical jobs like those Obama counted; these are real jobs held by real people. Someone should do the math. My guess is that the investments by Bain probably created or saved about 10% as many jobs as Obama claims to have done in the entire country as a result of spending just under a trillion dollars. Seems like Romney did a whole lot better on that score.