Cramer Asks a Stupid Question, Romney and Gingrich Provide Great Answers

Last night at the CNBC debate, Jim "Buy Bear Stearns" Cramer asked what I would call a very stupid question in his characteristically crazy manner (though honestly he seemed even more crazy last night, like he was hopped up on some Bolivian marching powder) about whether corporations had a responsibility to create jobs:

CRAMER: Governor Romney, do you believe public companies have any social responsibility to create jobs, or do you believe, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the most important, most influential conservative economist of the 20th century held, that corporations should exist solely to create maximum profit for their shareholders?

ROMNEY: This is a wonderful philosophical debate. But you know what? We don't have to decide between the two, because they go together.

Our Democratic friends think when a corporation is profitable, that's a bad thing. I remember asking someone, "Where do you think profits go? When you hear that a company is profitable, where do you think it goes?" And they said, "Well, to pay the executives their big bonuses."

I said, "No, actually, none of it goes to pay the executives. Profit is what is left over after they have all been paid."

What happens with profit is that you can grow the business. You can expand it. You have working capital and you hire people.

The right thing for America is to have profitable enterprises that can hire people. I want to make American businesses successful and thrive.

What we have in Washington today is a president and an administration that doesn't like business, that somehow thinks they want jobs, but they don't like businesses. Look, I want to see our businesses thrive and grow and expand and be profitable. I want to see more --

So current profits and expectations of future profits drive job growth.  Which explains why we are in our current mess despite the fact that corporate profitability is at high levels.  Corporations really don't have confidence of future profitability thanks to massive new regulations, a slowing economy, a crisis in Europe and Obamacare (Dodd-Frank if they are in finance).  And then there is the answer from Gingrich, which of course I like a whole lot better as it takes a dig at the losers in Occupy Wall Street:

CRAMER: Mr. Speaker, how about to you, can corporations do both?

GINGRICH: Sure. Look, obviously, corporations can and should do both. And what is amazing to me is the inability of much of our academic world and much of our news media and most of the people on Occupy Wall Street to have a clue about history.

(APPLAUSE)

GINGRICH: In this town, Henry Ford started as an Edison Electric supervisor who went home at night and built his first car in the garage. Now, was he in the 99 percent or the one percent?

Bill Gates drops out of college to found Microsoft. Is he in the one percent or the 99 percent?

Historically, this is the richest country in the history of the world because corporations succeed in creating both profits and jobs, and it's sad that the news media doesn't report accurately how the economy works.

(APPLAUSE)

BARTIROMO: Mr. Speaker -- I'm sorry, but what is the media reporting inaccurately about the economy?

GINGRICH: What?

BARTIROMO: What is the media reporting inaccurately about the economy?

(LAUGHTER)

GINGRICH: I love humor disguised as a question. That's terrific.

I have yet to hear a single reporter ask a single Occupy Wall Street person a single rational question about the economy that would lead them to say, for example, "Who is going to pay for the park you are occupying if there are no businesses making a profit?"

(APPLAUSE)