Obama’s Economic Team Declares No Confidence in Policies

Townhall.com ^ | June 13, 2011 | Lurita Doan

[Kaslin]

Don’t look now, but many on Obama’s economic team is abandoning ship and heading for the exits. Austan Goolsbee’s, who recently resigned from his post as the White House economic advisor after less than a year, is just the most visible defection. Obama’s economic team is headed for the doors and following the lead of the more senior economic advisors. Christine Roemer, Larry Summers and Peter Orszag were the first to abandon Obama’s economic team as it became painfully obvious that their policies on job creation had failed. These are the same advisors that assured Americans that a huge expansion of entitlements, an historic increase in the size of government, almost doubling of the national debt by $5 trillion, while hobbling small businesses with a new thicket of regulations, would actually result in economic expansion and job growth across the nation.

Not only were these presidential advisors wrong, but disastrously so. Rarely has a group failed so spectacularly. Thus, Americans should not be surprised that many of the lower levels of Obama’s National Economic Council team (Sarah Cannon, Eric Lesser, Bryan Jung, Kyle Watkins, Pascal Noel) are also abandoning the sinking Obama ship. This mass exodus of Team Obama’s economic advisors is a stunning vote of no confidence in the President’s economic policies. Obama needs to consider this: When all of your staff give up, they are telling you that there is something flawed in the current approach that doesn’t work. Personnel is policy.

Mr. Obama’s supporters certainly understand that when key staffers depart en masse, they are essentially fleeing a losing endeavor and are hoping to get out before recriminations for failure have a chance to permanently tarnish personal reputations. No one wants to be part of a losing team, and, before the stench of defeat has a chance to permanently cling, they leave.

Curiously, this is the same argument that Obama’s supporters are using to characterize the recent defections from Newt Gingrich. Yet, when it comes to finding a rationale for why the entire Obama economic team has bolted for the doors, the Administration is essentially telling us that “there is nothing to see here…just move along”.

But moving along is not so easy. The Obama Administration’s job-creation strategies has resulted in a jump in unemployment to 9.1%, despite an imaginative and destructive amount of new government spending of nearly $5 trillion masquerading as economic stimulus. Say what you will, but at least Gingrich’s implosion only directly impacted his personal ambitions to seek higher office. The mass defection of Obama’s entire economic team by contrast, has directly and severely eroded the economic well being of every single American.

One of Obama’s favorite adjectives seems to be “unprecedented”. What’s unprecedented is the little-reported, massive, wholesale departure of a team of economic advisors. While the exodus of Newt Gingrich’s staff is gaining all of the media attention, the far more concerning departures of the President’s economic team has had little media coverage. With their departure, the President is now isolated and alone with his failures.

I wonder: were any Obama’s departing economic advisors honest enough to recognize and admit that their advice was flawed? Did any have the courage to go to the President and admit they were wrong? We can only hope they did—even as we bemoan the spectacle of a ruined economic policy and the sad specter of Obama holding the empty bag.

Another troubling fact to consider is that many of Obama’s economic team are leaving to join academia. Surely, if these folks believed in the Obama rhetoric, wouldn’t at least one of them go into the private sector? Since these are the folks that worked overtime to convince Americans that their economic policies would help job growth and promote small business development, why isn’t even one of Obama’s departing staff moving out to start up a small business and effectively demonstrate conviction in their ideas with actual deeds?

On the other hand, had Obama fired his economic team—that would have been a good thing. Firings would have shown that Obama realized that their advice had been flawed, that Obama recognized that the country was worse off than when he took office, and that he was trying to do something about it. For example, in 1985, David Stockman didn’t think that cutting taxes would grow the economy. Reagan did, so he fired Stockman, and it turns out Reagan was right. The economy under President Reagan boomed.

But make no mistake, the Obama’s Economic Policy is a shambles and the mass defection of all of his economic policy advisors is sending Americans a clear message of the chaos within the White House. Obama has churned through three different economic advisors in a short period of time and likely will burn through a few more. (During Reagan’s 8 years in office, he had a total of three.)

Wake up and smell the coffee, Mr. President. Obama’s people have abandoned his economic policy. Maybe it’s time for Obama to abandon it too.

[gogogodzilla]

Don’t worry. Mr. Obama will play 18 rounds of golf and then visit the palace of Versailles (at a cost of 5.8 billion dollars), which will solve all our problems.

[Lou L]

One of Obama’s favorite adjectives seems to be “unprecedented”. What’s unprecedented is the little-reported, massive, wholesale departure of a team of economic advisors

Their departure is not so much "unprecedented," as it is "unexpected."

[Buckeye McFrog]

but gee, these policies all seemed to work so beautifully during the Spring Semester Brown-Bag Teach-In Seminars /sarc

[BuffaloJack]

> It’s hard for me to get by the grammar in the first sentence. Does Town Hall not have an editor?

You are right; half of everything I read on the internet is grammatically incorrect.

[9YearLurker]

Can you imagine the fear of being Obama’s last identifiable original economic advisor? You’d just be waiting for him to decide to loose the guillotine on you.

What this self-evacuation does is leave no one left to blame, unless he really went after his own and sacrificed Geithner (which I don’t think he’d do).

[LomanBill]

Penny Pritzker: Obama's Campaign Finance Chair and Pioneer in Subprime Loans...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2085936/posts

Follow the....

http://www.campaignmoney.com/finance.asp?type=in&cycle=08&criteria=pritzker&fname=penny

 

Billionaire business mogul Penny Pritzker is a member of one of America’s richest families and was the Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.  It was Pritzker that led the prolific, and illegal, fundraising that helped power Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.  She was the chair of Chicago-based Superior Bank’s board for five years.  Pritzker was into subprime lending before it became all the rage starting in around 2000.  Prtizker's chairmanship was to concentrate on sub prime lending, principally on home mortgages, but for a while in subprime auto lending, too, after the Pritzkers' bank acquired its wholesale mortgage organization division, Alliance Funding, in December 1992. Back then they called it "predatory lending." Superior Bank went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured deposits; 1,406 depositors lost much of their life savings.  This collapse came amid harsh criticism of how Superior’s owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages. On Nov. 1 [2002] the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. pointed the finger at Ernst & Young, Superior’s auditor, in a fraud suit filed in federal court here.  But that action came two months after a group of Superior depositors accused the bank’s owners and directors, including two members of the Pritzker family, of racketeering....

[snip]

...Pritzker is chairman of Classic Residence by Hyatt, luxury senior living communities in 11 states; chairman of The Parking Spot, which owns and operates off-airport parking facilities in nine cities; chairman of the credit data company TransUnion and chairman of Pritzker Realty.  She also sits on the board of Global Hyatt and plays a role in numerous non-profit groups, including serving as chairman of the Olympic village portion of Chicago’s bid to win the 2016 Summer Games. 

 

http://www.theobamafile.com/_associates/PennyPritzker.htm

"nudge nudge nudge"

NOT - Bush's fault.