Quote of the Day: Romney’s Small Business Problem

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From Brian Maloney, owner of a trucking company that Mitt Romney visited yesterday, explaining how he built his business:

The government didn’t help — at all. No tax breaks. No “Good guy, Brian.” Just hard work did that and a few other dedicated people that came along with me.

I probably don’t need to finish this story, do I? In the same way that Joe the Plumber wasn’t named Joe and wasn’t really a plumber, it turns out that Maloney once took advantage of an industrial revenue bond to move his business to Roxbury, and much of his early success was due to a contract to overhaul city buses.

None of this is a big deal. I imagine Maloney worked his ass off to build his company. Mainly it’s just a warning to Romney: when he flits around the country embracing folks who have never relied on the government for a single dime, his team better do a good job of vetting them. Because most likely, all he’s going to do is provide the librul media with a lovely, prepackaged set of stories that demonstrate how virtually every small business in America benefits from government programs in one way or another. And that includes one particular small business called Bain Capital. I’ll bet someone is working on that story already.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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