During an interview published on Monday by Politico, Mitt Romney praised one of his favorite business leaders, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman. According to Politico, Romney said that his cabinet “would be dominated by people from the private sector, citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.”

This isn’t the first time that Romney has pointed to Whitman — who is also the former CEO of Ebay and a former California gubernatorial candidate — as a leader to emulate. But at the moment, Whitman is presiding over a company in free-fall. HP just suffered its largest quarterly loss ever and is shedding tens of thousands of jobs:

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) posted a record (HPQ) quarterly loss and reported slumping sales for personal computers and services aimed at businesses, underscoring the turnaround challenge facing Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman.

The fiscal third-quarter loss of $8.86 billion includes a writedown for the enterprise-services unit and reflects a 10 percent decline in PC revenue…Whitman is cutting 27,000 jobs over two years.

During her unsuccessful 2010 run for California’s governorship, Whitman released a slew of half-baked economic plans. These included a proposal to balance the Golden State’s budget that, according to a ThinkProgress analysis, wouldn’t come anywhere close to actually balancing the budget.

While at Ebay, Whitman succeeded in boosting net income, but eventually left the company crippled due to disastrous acquisitions: “A year after Whitman bailed on eBay, the stock had sunk so low that employees were left holding onto stock options that would actually cost more than than eBay’s market stock price, making them worse than worthless.” Before moving to Ebay, Whitman was CEO of FTD.com, where she oversaw a fifty percent drop in business during her two-year tenure. And evidently this is the sort of experience Romney would like to bring to the federal government.

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.

I pointed out yesterday that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s (R) job creation plan is based on a tax cut that economists don’t believe will create jobs or boost investment. Rather, it would amount to nothing more than a giveaway to California’s wealthy.

But Whitman’s plan to balance the state budget also leaves a lot to be desired. As UC Berkley economic Michael Reich noted, Whitman’s promise to cut $15 billion from the budget “necessarily implies significant reductions in spending on education, health, and social service programs on top of the deep cuts already made in the past two years.” But you won’t hear that from her, if her interview today with the New York Times’ John Harwood is any indication:

HARWOOD: Every single, at the national level, big deficit reduction package…has involved tax increases, revenue, as well as spending cuts. Is the better part of honesty and candor with the voters of California to say that’s what you’re going to have to do as well?

WHITMAN: I don’t believe we are going to have to do that. I am against increasing taxes on Californians.

HARWOOD: You can close a $19 billion budget deficit just by cutting spending?

WHITMAN: And growing the economy.

Watch it:

In the interview, Whitman named four things that she would do to supposedly save $15 billion (which still wouldn’t eliminate California’s $19 billion deficit). Here’s a look at why they amount to little more than hot air: Read more

A key plank in California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s (R) job creation plan is completely eliminating her state’s capital gains tax. Such a move would blow a $4 to $4.5 billion annual hole in the budget over the next five years (and the losses would get bigger after that), but Whitman is convinced that such a move would spur job creation and investment in the Golden State.

“If we eliminate this capital gains tax, what you’ll see is more jobs, more businesses, more tax revenues so we can invest in the things we really want to invest in,” Whitman said during a debate this week. “To the Recovery effort that I have planned, tax cuts are a big part of it.” Whitman doubled down yesterday on Fox News, telling Neil Cavuto, “we’ve got a decision to make. Either, as Californians, we’re going to put our head in the sand and say ‘the weather’s great here, but jobs are going to continue to leave the state’ or we’re going to change our whole perspective.” Watch a compilation:

Whitman portrays this idea as a definite job creator, but the truth is much cloudier. What is certain, however, is that this tax cut will primarily benefit the wealthy. 82 percent of the California’s capital gains tax is paid by people who make $500,000 per year. Those people make up just one percent of the state’s population. 93 percent of the tax is paid by people making more than $200,000 per year.

Just 1.5 percent of the capital gains tax is payed by those making between $30,000 and $100,000. Also, California taxes capital at the same rate that it taxes income, making this change even more egregious, as it remakes a system that equally values work and investment, almost exclusively to the benefit of the wealthy.

As for spurring investment, Kirk Stark, a UCLA tax law professor, said, “it’s unlikely that a capital gains tax cut would lead to significantly greater investment in California.” “What we’re talking about here are people buying and selling stocks,” he said. “A lot of capital gains is not related to entrepreneurial activity,” added Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project. “It’s ‘Did I pick the right mutual fund last year or pick Apple stock before the iPad was released?’”

UC Berkely professor Michael Reich noted that the research on capital gains cuts reveals that the “net effect of lower rates on revenues is negative and the effects on economic growth are extremely small at best.” “Eliminating the state capital gains tax would do very little to spur investment in the state,” Reich wrote. “Most California investors’ portfolios are diversified nationally and internationally. Consequently, the vast majority of private income retained by investors would be spent on stock purchases of companies outside the state.”

This is the crux of Whitman’s job creation plan. So if the research is to be believed, that plan leaves a lot to be desired.