“You raise taxes and you kill jobs. That’s why the National Federation of Independent Businesses said your plan will kill 700,000 jobs. I don’t want to kill jobs in this environment.”
— Mitt Romney, October 3, 2012 Presidential Debate
Gather before me, O denizens of the realm! Take to thy knees and quake in tremulous submission, for before you stands the Great Obama—first of his name, Lord Protector of the fifty states, and destroyer of the jobs of men!
Lo, your wails and lamentations shall avail you not, for understand that those jobs that Barack, Butcher of Livelihoods has marked for slaughter shall be vanquished just the same.
And I have marked them all.
But, Your Grace—you beg—didst thou not endeavor most earnestly these past four years to create jobs? Were not thy stimulus measures and judicious management of the Federal Reserve not responsible for the preservation of thousands—nay, millions of the very jobs you now wish to put to the blade?
Guard thy foolish tongue, knave! For you see, my seeming beneficence was but a mummer’s farce—a cruel jape contrived only to give me a moment’s passing amusement. And ’twas none other than mine own arch foe, Mitt of House Romney—leal defender of jobs everywhere—who discerned my artifice and had the courage to name me for what I was and am: a macroeconomic barbarian with an implacable hunger for sub-par employment figures.
A mere 700,000 jobs will be but a foretaste of the woe and doom I shall visit upon the private-sector labor markets. The streets will be awash in the tears of the kin and womenfolk of those whose careers I have pitilessly ridden down whilst astride my destrier of vaguely Keynesian fiscal policies. With my trusted longsword Taxbringer, forged in the fires of Mount Redistribution, I shall cut down occupations two and three abreast until the ground is strewn thick with first-time jobless claims.
(This, even though increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans represents an effective way to combat the growing federal budget deficit and to help bankroll programs aimed at modernizing our public education system, energy sector, and healthcare infrastructure while simultaneously spurring economic growth, and even though the September 2012 Labor Department jobs report placed unemployment at 7.8%, the lowest its been since before I took office. Yes, despite that, I am still going to kill a bunch of jobs just like Mitt Romney says.)
Forsooth!
But to be sure, ‘twas most charitable of Ser Mitt to commend me for my prowess as a jobslayer—after all, the man himself is no stranger to the art. Why, ‘tis said that he once laid waste to 100 full-time positions with a single deft slash of a monogrammed $4,000 Tibaldi fountain pen whilst serving as Lord Commander of an asset management company.
Yet what are a handful of heartless firings when weighed against the enormity that will nigh be wrought by Barack Jobsbane? They are but the work of a green squire, still largely uninitiated in the ways of downsizecraft. My nemesis knows little and less of what it is to look a job in the eye as you stave it in upon the spearpoint of enhanced administrative regulation of capital markets, or what it is to luxuriate in the victory of plummeting new-hiring data as you recline atop a throne hewn from the remnants of small businesses.
(Because those were actual, objectively demonstrable outcomes of my economic policies to date.)
No, these savage conquests belong only to the Obama—Thinner of Payrolls, Blighter of Post-College Career Plans. For know that I shall not sheathe my steel ‘til at last I have delivered the mercy of death to every marginally decent professional opportunity still limping feebly through this forsaken hellscape of an economy. Or ‘til the famous bards and minstrels have composed elaborate paeans to my genius for stoking minor, somewhat routine recessions into roiling conflagrations of financial misery. (Again, because that really happened or is going to happen). Or ‘til I have caused those same bards and minstrels to be laid off. Indeed, I shall not call halt to this relentless campaign of occupational carnage until the day whereupon the only job left un-killed is mine own—that of the Eternal Job Killer.
I mean, unless Mitt Romney continues to mischaracterize the likely outcomes of my fiscal policies and make it seem like the economy isn’t improving, in which case, yeah, then I’m probably going to be out of work.