Mitt Romney’s former company Bain Capital has a spotted history of investing in companies that offshored jobs overseas to countries like China. At the same time Romney blasts outsourcing on the campaign trail, calling President Obama “outsourcer-in-chief,” his former partners at Bain have defended the practice.
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” Romney’s former partner at Bain Capital Edward Conard made the case for outsourcing jobs, which he argues in his book, “Unintended Consequence”:
CONARD: I think the problem with defending it, for Mitt, I’m not speaking for Mitt [...] people look very close at the micro, get their nose close to the paper and say, ah-ha there is a job that was lost and went overseas, and we can speak about Bain. On a macro level we can see 20 million immigrants came into our country, there’s net insourcing, not net outsourcing. We were growing the economy fast enough that we were pulling the employees into the country, more than sending out of the country. Of the 40 million jobs created, 50 percent were created at the highest end of the wage scale, 40 percent of the jobs in the 1980s were at the highest end of the wage scale, so, there was a disproportionate increase at the high end of the wage scale over that, over that period.
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Meanwhile, Romney’s top economic adviser Greg Mankiw has also argued for outsourcing jobs, calling it “a good thing.” As another Bain manager explained, “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” Romney’s role at Bain was to create wealth for his firm, not jobs.
