…in our current debt downgrade situation:
Christina Romer, the former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers on Friday offered a rather strong opinion concerning the announcement by Standard & Poor’s that the credit rating agency downgraded America’s debt to AA+.
Appearing on HBO’s “Real Time,” Romer said we’re “pretty darn f–ked”…
Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never heard that particular word before. Or that I have not used that particular word, either. I have. Often. Loudly. Emphatically. Sometimes even gratuitously. Ms. Romer even used it in context, although ‘in context’ in this case means ‘on the site of what is by all accounts a metaphorical and bacteriological cesspool.’ But I am forced to remind Ms. Romer that one major reason why we’re in the mess that we’re in right now is specifically because of her incompetence as President Obama’s chief economist. As has been pointed out many, many times: the report that Romer and the rest of her eased-out-the-door staff put together used the argument that if the proposed stimulus passed, unemployment would cap at 8%; and if it failed to pass, unemployment would hit 9%. So, having sold the argument, the Obama administration took almost a trillion dollars that we didn’t actually really have and spent it…
…and by the time that the geniuses at the White House finally noticed that the stimulus did nothing to stop unemployment from reaching 10% it was too late: we were already watching Democrats throw away 2009 and the first half of 2010 on job- and economy-killing initiatives like cap-and-trade and health care rationing*. In other words: while I’m not going to even suggest that Christina Romer destroyed the American economy all on her lonesome, if I had made this kind of catastrophic professional error I’d probably be meditating on my sins in a Trappist monastery somewhere.
But that’s me: Christina Romer goes on Bill Maher’s show, instead. Then again, given this dunderheaded conclusion to her mistake, that’s not surprising:
Except for the unexpectedly severe collapse in economic growth, Romer said, the report has turned out to be “very accurate.”
Yes. Except for that.
Moe Lane
*They spent the second half of 2010 hiding, of course.
Didn’t help.
And once again, the wise are made to look foolish. I especially liked the part where she said that these things are best left to the experts. We left it to the experts and the data from that experiment is not looking so good.
Romer, Summers, Orszag and Goolsbee should stand trial. Instead, they will teach at Harvard. Some country, eh?