A great point from The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, an msnbc contributor:
“Having been in the private sector for 25 years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand,” Mitt Romney told Time.But then how does Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has spent his entire career in politics, understand job creation so well? Ryan and Romney, after all, have proposed essentially the exact same economic policies. And Ryan proposed most of them first. If Romney’s ideas are informed by knowledge you can only collect in the private sector, how come they don’t differ more from the ideas of career Republican politicians?
The answer, of course, is that they're not informed by any kind of super-secret business knowledge. They're standard Republican boilerplate: cut taxes, especially for the rich, reduce regulation, and shrink government. The line about having been in the private sector for 25 years is just part of Romney's image-making—it has nothing to do with the actual policies he's proposing.