Posted on 09/02/2010 1:08:15 PM PDT by Rashputin
Christina Romer, the departing chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, was at a complete loss of words when it came to explaining the state of the economy when she appeared at her valedictory lunch before her returns to her teaching sinecure at Berkley. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post comments:
She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.
What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: "Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare."
Recall, this is the expert chosen by Obama to help oversee the economy. Ms. Romer predicted that the Obama stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate at 8 percent or less; it is now 9.5 percent. We are more in debt than ever before, no matter how that debt is measured -- in absolute terms, as a percent of GDP, or as a percent of the federal budget (assuming the Democrats would be responsible enough to actually pass one before the midterms).
In the spirit of confession, she admitted Obama's team was unprepared.
When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."
Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."
That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.
Perhaps I, a humble economics major from Northwestern University and a holder of an MBA from the same, might offer some suggestions to why the economy is failing: anti-business rhetoric from Barack Obama and Democratic leaders; pro-union policies , ObamaCare, and rules and regulations that depress hiring; the prospects for cap and tax and anti-trade policies that put a clamp on the animal spirits that are needed to give a pulse to the economy. And let us not forget about the wide range of steep tax increases that are coming on New Year's Day 2011. Those won't help, Ms. Romer, and those are the responsibility of the administration where she held a powerful position.
Perhaps, the ideas behind Keynesian economics, so beloved by liberals because it encourages spending and sanctions big debt, have to be reconsidered.
Are we shocked that the team Obama assembled to run the economy (heralded as the best and the brightest by the courtier media) are so clueless when it comes to the real world? After all, so few of them-including Barack Obama-have any experience in the real world of business and industry.
Maybe Professor Romer will have time when she returns to her cosseted academic life to consider some of these factors that might account for the economy's troubles. Hopefully, she can teach her students better than she helped run the economy.
When people give up their common sense and vote in a president that is an obvious con man, they really don't have anyone to blame for the resulting problems but themselves. Sadly, they take the rest of us with them on the resulting collapse. It's time to finally admit that our education system has left us with an uneducated, gullible, fantasy prone, electorate.
What we have show for forty years of ever increasing spending on education is exactly what the democrat fascists wanted, ignorant and easily led fools who haven't matured past about junior high emotionally. It's time to shed he democrat machine in politics and education completely along with every plan, agency, department, tenured professor, assistant to the assistant assistant, and post-it note they've ever put in place.
Education not indoctrination and legal penalties for those who cross the line.
What is her class title going to be?
Economic Failure 101?
If you pick a professor from berkely as an economics tsar, you already know what you’re getting.
“She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.”
All they’re sure about is that it’s all Bush’s fault. Pathetic.
Christina is going back to indoctrinate the next generation of useful idiots. Great.
it is so unexpected ya know
The Obama clown show in action!
She should rot in prison for her criminal ignorance, but of course she will prosper.
it is so unexpected ya know
____________________________
un-president-ed
Actually, Romer was the sharpest and most honest of his bunch of advisors. I think she’s probably taking the fall for Obama’s failures, among others’.
How can this be? Wasn't she advertised as one of the best and brightest, just like the rest of the pack of buffoons obummer has appointed.
Yep, she’s even conned to sell Americans on the Health sCare bill,
Obama’s Plan for Health Care Reform - Christina Romer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBlQ9daSruo
Excerpts from White House CEA Chair Christina Romer’s LinkedIn Q&A on SMB health care reform
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7XruCdYZk
Great piece. Too bad they made a mistake in the third to last word in the last sentence, and by missing one letter. It should have been, “Hopefully, she can teach her students better than she helped ruIn the economy.”
The economic projections that were the basis for Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package of spending and tax cuts were based on data from late 2008, before Mr. Obama took office.
"Stimulus Averted Depression, Romer Says"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/business/economy/02romer.html?_r=1&ref=economic_stimulus
Democrats usually recruit professors for policy making although they have had no “hands on” experience in the real world of business and labor.
Reading a book on how to fly a plane is not the equivalent of acutally training in a plane as a pilot. But they think it is the same and they have no need of experience.
As if human psychology has nothing to do with what Smith et al. were wise enough to call political economy.
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