Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is promising to cut the U.S. unemployment rate by 2 points to 6% if he is given four years in the White House.
Romney made the promise in a video interview with Time’s Mark Halperin, who is also an msnbc analyst.
“Over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6% or a little lower,” he said. “It depends on part on the rate of growth of the globe and what we’re seeing here in the United States.”
Earlier this month, Romney chided the Obama administration for celebrating “anything over 4%” unemployment. In April, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 8.1%, its lowest point in three years, but it was impacted by the unemployed giving up on their job search.
As CNN points out, that revised 6% rate isn’t a terribly ambitious goal to set for the end of 2016. Based on the current rate of growth, the jobless rate is expected to fall to around 7% by the end of 2015, and 5.5% by the end of 2017, according to reports by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office. When asked by Halperin if he had a new idea for jump-starting the economy that the American public hadn’t heard yet, Romney deferred. “It’s a system of factors that come together to make an economy work,” he said, while citing favorable trade agreements and labor and management rules as some of things he would target to change the system.
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