The WSJ’s Daniel Henninger expands upon a point I made the other day: Corporate America entered the 1980s in bad shape and in desperate need of restructuring. And it was Mitt Romney—and many others like him—to the rescue. Here’s Henninger:
If not for Bain Capital and the other, bigger players who commenced a decade of leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers in the 1980s, the odds are that the U.S.’s “fundamentals” would be similarly weak. Instead, the U.S. corporate sector remade itself during the Bain years. … Arguably, the primary force that set off the 1980s upheaval in U.S. corporate restructuring was the deregulation begun by Jimmy Carter and continued by Ronald Reagan. Airlines, ground transportation, cable and broadcasting, oil and gas, banking and financial services all experienced regulatory rollback. Meanwhile, a competitive, globalized marketplace was rising. Management at some of America’s biggest companies, confused by these rapid changes, found themselves sitting on huge piles of unused or poorly deployed cash and assets.
Thousands of Mitt Romneys allied with huge pension funds representing colleges, unions and the like, plus a rising cadre of institutional money managers, to force corporate America to reboot. In the 1980s almost half of major U.S. corporations got takeover offers. Singling out this or that Bain case study amid the jostling and bumping is pointless. This was a historic and necessary cleansing of the Augean stables of the American economy. It caused a positive revolution in U.S. management, financial analysis, incentives, governance and market-based discipline. It led directly to the 1990s boom years. And it gave the U.S. two decades of breathing room while Europe, with some exceptions, choked.
Indeed, that massive restructuring effort is a big reason why Europe has found itself unable to close the gap in living standards with America. The United States now stands at $48,147 in per capita GDP, according to the IMF, vs. $37,935 for Germany, $35,974 for Great Britain, and $35,048 for France. (And Japan is at $34,362.)
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And sadly, about 1/3rd of our under-educated citizenry will believe your BS story. They won’t look for another source to verify the claims, they won’t wonder what position the author has towards the topic, they won’t feel compelled to think about the content and make their own judgements on the merits – they just believe. Lazy citizens make lazy politics. And here we have proof it doesn’t matter if the information is factual or not. The human species is doomed to extinction. Most of us are too dumb to find our way home every night.