Hewlett Packard has announced that they will be laying off 27,000 people — eight percent of their staff– after losses of over a billion dollars in the last year.
Mitt Romney, though, thinks that HP’s CEO would make a great governor.
Just last week, Romney stated that if HP CEO Meg Whitman had won her bid for governor, the state of California would be in a much better financial situation:
I wish Californians had elected Meg Whitman. She would have been more successful and explained to Californians the need to cut back on spending and eliminate unnecessary programs. There are other states that have very different records. I think it’s interesting that the state with the highest or among the highest tax rates in the nation also has the worst or near the worst deficit.
California does have a devastatingly high unemployment rate — 10.9 percent — but if all of the HP workers who are getting laid off lived in the state, its unemployment rate would be pushed over the 11 percent line.
Meanwhile, the spending cuts Whitman and Romney advocate wouldn’t actually help the state economy. As Center for American Progress economist Adam Hersh noted in 2011, the states that have cut the most spending have shed the most jobs.
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