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Welcome to "On This Day ... in Space!" where we peer back in our archives to find historic moments in spaceflight and astronomy. So enjoy a blast from the past with Space.com's Hanneke Weitering to look back at what happened on this day in space! On Nov.  21, 1676, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer discovered the speed of light . Before Rømer figured it out, scientists thought that light travels instantaneously, or infinitely fast. Rømer disproved this almost by accident when he was studying Jupiter's moon Io. He was trying to figure out how long it takes Io to orbit Jupiter in hopes...

The sequesteria (irrational fear of sequestration) continues. For example, Newark Mayor Cory Booker claims that the sequester “is brunt, brutal and blind.” The Obama Administration suspended tours of the White House “because of sequestration.” George Mason University City and Regional Planning Professor Stephen Fuller claims that 2.14 million jobs could be lost because of the sequester. Now, take a deep breath. * Sequestration reduces the rate of increase in federal spending. It does not cut a penny of actual spending. * Under the sequester, total federal spending goes up, just by less than it would have gone up without sequestration....

In June of this year, a little known organization called the American Economic Review published a 39 page research article, titled “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks.” I have quoted from the publication here: This paper investigates the causes and consequences of changes in the level of taxation in the postwar United States. Our results indicate that tax changes have very large effects on output. Our baseline specification implies that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by almost three percent… and that [capital] investment falls...

... "I have no doubt without the actions President Obama took and actions Chairman Bernanke and the Fed took we would be in a much, much worse situation," says Christina Romer, former chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "This had all of the makings of terrible depression and the fact we are struggling but coming out is a tribute to the President's policies." Specifically, Romer says the Recovery Act and other measures taken by the administration "made a difference, helped to strengthen growth and bring down the unemployment rate." Of course, Romer was one of the architects of...

... Today, inflation is still low, but unemployment is stuck at a painfully high level. And, as in 1979, the methods the Fed has used so far aren’t solving the problem. ... It would work like this: The Fed would start from some normal year — like 2007 — and say that nominal G.D.P. should have grown at 4 1/2 percent annually since then, and should keep growing at that pace. Because of the recession and the unusually low inflation in 2009 and 2010, nominal G.D.P. today is about 10 percent below that path. Adopting nominal G.D.P. targeting commits the...

A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations. In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women. “This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” “I felt like a piece...

University of California, Berkeley Professor Christina Romer, the Obama administration’s first chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday night. Romer — who resigned in 2010 after inaccurately predicting that the $800 billion stimulus would lower the unemployment rate — said that the S&P credit downgrade was a sign that we are “pretty darn f****.” “The long run budget situation is abysmal,” Romer said. “And it has been abysmal going back at least a decade. So it was never an immediate emergency. And it is something that we

Obama Adviser Admits We’re Not Experiencing “Job-Less Recovery” We’re Going Through a “Growth-less Recovery” (Video)Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, July 5, 2011, 10:00 PM Verum Serum caught this speech by former Chair of White House Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer on April 12 of this year. This was after she left the administration. Romer admitted in her speech that they managed to create a “growth-less recovery.” Romer also admits that Barack Obama knew just how bad the economy really was when before he took office because she told him how bad it was.

Frustrated by "the suffering of real families," President Obama's former top economic adviser recently called for action: "If I have a complaint about policy these days, it's that we're not doing enough," Christina Romer said in a speech last month at Vanderbilt University. "I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it's shameful that we're not using them." With unemployment still near 9% and the "real" unemployment rate at 15.7%, "we can't afford not to do more," Romer tells me in the accompanying video. "For heaven's sake with this many people...

"I frankly don't understand why policy makers aren't more worried about the suffering of real families..." Calling the Obama Administration's flippant lack of concern for a comatose labor market they've done so much to create "shameful", former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer -who left the Administration last fall- spoke Tuesday at Vanderbilt University:  “I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them”: __________________________________________________________________________ ...the sharpness of her criticism reflected deep concern among many Democratic economists about a political consensus that the federal government has to rein...

A successful parasite must keep its host alive, finding the point where it can maximize its intake without killing off its source of sustenance. So, too, with governments taxing their citizenry. With taxation, governments can reach the point where higher rates produce less revenue. An academic study found that a tax increase of just 1% of GDP causes a recession and then a permanent loss of 1.84% of GDP compared to what it would have been without the tax increase. The results of this study have some really broad and interesting implications. The punchline is that this study was done...

Today, Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave her farewell speech before returning to Berkley to teach. In that speech we learn that she still doesn’t understand exactly “why it was so bad”. It’s good that Romer is returning to academia because she wouldn’t be hired in the private sector. In places where people actually have to create wealth, results matter. Romer helped develop a policy where unemployment reached nearly 10% and her excuse was “almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction.” This is an example of the Obama team that was billed as...

Outgoing Obama Aide Admits: Stimulus Failed Because We Didn't Understand The Recession Joe Weisenthal Sep. 1, 2010, 8:29 PM As she prepares to leave The White House, outgoing economic advisor Christina Romer has delivered something of a valedictory speech to the National Press Club. The title: Not My Father's Recession. For Romer, her Father's recession was the one in the early 80s, when unemployment surged above 10%, and Romer's own father got laid off. But the title basically tells you what you need to know: It's different this time -- this recession was not anything like the Fed-induced recession of...

In June of this year, a little known organization called the American Economic Review published a 39 page research article, titled “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks.” I have quoted from the publication here: This paper investigates the causes and consequences of changes in the level of taxation in the postwar United States. Our results indicate that tax changes have very large effects on output. Our baseline specification implies that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by almost three percent… and that [capital] investment falls...

The current government employment report is just the most recent example of bad news for the economy expressed in depressing unemployment figures that the wizards in the Washington constantly find either "surprising" or "unexpected." -- snip --They're all surprised by how their theories fail in the real world because few of them have ever worked in the private economy, and they have no clue how government intrusion in the marketplace burdens the entrepreneur...

GOP rep: Obama's 'in deep doo-doo' By Bridget Johnson - 08/07/10 01:08 PM ET Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said Friday that "a lot of people want to jump off" and follow Christina Romer out of the Obama administration. "When you see a ship starting to sink, a lot of people want to jump off," the congressman said on Fox Business Network. "And she is one." Romer, chairwoman of the president's council of economic advisers, announced Thursday that she was leaving Washington and returning to an economics teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley. "This president is in deep...

As she prepares to step down as President Obama's chief economist, Christina Romer said Friday that she wishes she could redo one of her first official acts for the president: last January's forecast that a big shot of federal spending would save millions of jobs and keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent. The forecast was wrong. Many economists agree that Obama's stimulus package probably saved millions of jobs, but the recession was far worse than Romer predicted. Unemployment has soared and is stuck at 9.5 percent. Republicans campaigning to regain control of Congress have seized upon Romer's report as...

Losing is the New WinningBy: Larry Walker, Jr.According to today's Employment Status Report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that as of July 31, 2010 there were 857,000 fewer persons employed than there were in July of 2009. Yet from Barack's glass bubble, it sounded like all is well. Sure, his chief economist, Christina Romer just resigned, but that's no cause for concern. The latest from Obama is that 'private employment has increased every month' during 2010. Really? Does that mean there are more jobs today than there were yesterday?Following is my latest presidential scorecard, based purely on official...

Obama's top economic advisor, professor Christina Romer, is quitting. Apparently the decision is her own, and the split is cordial, although not surprisingly she didn't get as much access to the President as she'd hoped. Of course anyone who thought that any President would be more likely to listen to an academic, rather than a political handler (like Rahm) was always doomed to be mistaken.

Christina Romer, who chairs the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, said the U.S. needs stronger job growth to lower the nation's unemployment rate.