Does The Economic Recovery Prove Mitt Romney Was Right Or Wrong?

According to nymag.com, as the economy moves into growth, the Republican Party finds itself awkwardly retreating from years of doom-saying and into weariness. The Republican party concedes that things have gotten better, but everybody knew it would happen. “Mitt Romney knew the day would come when a president would be able to swagger into the House Chamber and lay claim to a burgeoning economic recovery,” writes Jon Ward.

Ward’s evidence for Romney’s insight into the inevitable recovery is a statement the Republican candidate made:

“I wouldn’t be going after this job if I thought the future was bleak. I would not want to be president — be on watch if you will — as America goes over a cliff. I would not want to take this job and this responsibility if I didn’t think the future is going to be extraordinarily bright.”

Here’s Mitt Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention:

“His policies have not helped create jobs.  They’ve depressed them, and this I can tell you about where President Obama would take America.  His plan to put taxes on small businesses won’t not add jobs. It will eliminate them. …”

Romney felt that he was the only man that could bring economic growth to the country.  How confident was Romney that Obama’s job-killing policies would prevent the economy from recovering? Apparently, he was 100 percent confident:

“…and his trillion dollar deficits, they slow our economy, restrain employment, and cause wages to stall.  To the majority of Americans who now believe the future will not be better than the past, I can guarantee you this — if Barack Obama is reelected, you will be right.”

Romney guaranteed the economy would get worse. The point is that the Republican analysis held, as a matter of certainty, that the Obama economic program (stimulus, higher taxes on the rich, health care, clean energy, etc.) would make a strong recovery impossible.

That analysis does not seem to be real.

German Consumer Confidence Highest In Eight Years

Photo: Brian Lawrence

Consumers in Germany are putting the country’s economic troubles behind them and looking to the new year with renewed optimism.

Consumer confidence in Europe’s largest economy improved this month, having stabilized in November after several months of decline, according to GfK.  In fact, German consumer sentiment hit its highest level in eight years as shoppers felt more upbeat about Europe’s largest economy going into 2015.

Market research group GfK said its forward-looking consumer sentiment indicator rose to 9.0 going into January from 8.7 in December, the highest reading since December 2006.

“Consumers apparently now assume that the period of economic weakness in Germany will pass and the domestic economy will return to growth in the coming months,” GfK said in a statement.

The reading is based on a survey of around 2,000 Germans, who give their expectations about pay and the economy in the coming months, as well as their willingness to spend money.

However, the research group warned that concerns about instability in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq and the Ebola outbreak continued to drag on the economy.

Student Sues Her Divorced Parents For Tuition, Wins

On Monday, a Superior Court judge in Camden, NJ ordered the parents of 21-year-old Temple University student Caitlyn Ricci to pay $906 of her tuition from Gloucester County College (now known as Rowan College at Gloucester County). She has been in a legal battle with her parents, Maura McGarvey and Michael Ricci, for more than a year.

The decision follows a ruling from this fall that bound her parents to pay $16,000 toward her tuition at Temple. The two have appealed that ruling.

Ricci sued her parents last spring, and reports say the woman has not seen her parents outside of court appearances in about two years. Her grandparents are paying her legal fees

Ricci’s legal victory has a legal precedent in Newburgh v. Arrigo, 88 N.J. 529 (1982). In that case, a judge ruled that divorced parents were legally responsible for paying for their children’s higher education.

In November, the parents told Chris J. Brown, a New Jersey assemblyman working to create legislation blocking adult children from suing their parents for tuition, that while they are divorced, they have jointly made decisions about raising their daughter.