Romney will repeat mistakes of others

There have been plenty of comments regarding the Romney slogan “Are you better off today than four years ago?” While I certainly have compassion for the unemployed in this country, everyone must realize that those who have a decent amount invested in the stock market are substantially better off today than four years ago. In fact since the market lows of March 2009 the S&P 500 is up well over 100 percent.

Compare this to the eight disastrous Bush years when the market had the very worst performance (actually a large negative return) of any two-term president in history. The only other administrations with similar returns were Richard Nixon (who didn’t quite make it two terms) and Herbert Hoover (who was president for the first 3-plus years of the Great Depression and employed the typical Republican mantra that “free markets will correct themselves”).

Now Gov. Mitt Romney would like us to go back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place. One of his ideas is repealing Dodd-Frank since the financial institutions did such a good job of controlling and correcting themselves.

Many people like to bring up Einstein’s quote “insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.” Wouldn’t that apply to electing Romney?

Phil Williams

Palatine