Failed economic adviser Christina Romer recounted the dire economy that she herself made even worse:
Hey Romer - the stimulus was and is a FAIL! As for Romer, from a prior post of mine: Video: CEA chair Christina Romer spins the unemployment rise to 9.7% in August. A snippet from that post from September 2009 when it wa apparent that the stimulus bill was failing to live up to the promises:
News broke yesterday that the unemployment rate in August increased to a 26-year high of 9.7%, with expectations of the rate topping 10% and increasing into 2010. The numbers were totally white-washed by the AP (How To Sugarcoat Obama's Rising Unemployment Rate, Now At 9.7%? AP Shows Us How!). Worse yet, teen unemployment hit an all-time high of over 25% (1 in 4 teens unemployed). Even worse yet is this from Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit:Real Unemployment Rate Hits 16.8%. This sounds upsetting, but when listening to NPR and reading the NYT I felt so much more reassured. They’re not unemployed, they’re funemployed!Remember when the Obama administration predicted unemployment topping out at 8% is the $1 trillion stimulus boondoggle was passed (including compliance costs. It will be even more if you consider interest on the debt). How did that work out? Not well:The actual unemployment rate is not only higher than what was predicted if the stimulus plan passed, but worse than was predicted if nothing had been done at all. So what do you do if you are Christina Romer who came up with the 8% peak? Spin like a top, and then some:
She's a failure and an embarrassment and Berkeley should be ashamed of having her actually teach students economics. It would be like having Bernie Madoff teach about ethics.
UPDATE: From another prior post:
The stimulus didn't work. Obama said it will create 3.5 million new jobs. Instead, 3 million have been lost. A B+? Hardly. More like an F-. Even Christina Romer admitted it was a failure. From HotAir: Romer: We had no clue … and still don’tEmbarrassing...Glenn Reynolds also has this: "CHRISTINA ROMER, MYSTIFIED. “Yes, we’ve noticed that every damned thing that happens is declared ‘unexpected.’ . . . The act is broadly on track is a helpful thing to believe if you want to experience every bit of bad news as a surprise. . . . Well, if you did the quantitative analysis in order to support the policy preference you put first, then it’s not… surprising that that your quantitative analysis was second-rate.”"As I have said many times in this blog, the stimulus made things worse, not better. ObamaCare and the prospect of cap-and-trade made things even worse. There hasn't been one thing Obama and the Democrats have done right with respect to the economy. If they had done nothing at all it would have been far better than what they did do. You want to know what's perhaps even scarier? Christina Romer is stepping down and is going to instead... teach economics. Yikes.Dana Milbank describes how depressing it was to the gathered media to have someone on the inside of the Obama administration tell them that the emperor and his staff have no clothes when it comes to the economy: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.Just how bad was it? Romer admitted that no one at the White House understood the fundamentals of this recession, and how they just assumed it would behave like previous recessions. And it might have done so, had the Obama administration applied the policies that alleviated previous recessions, especially those that Ronald Reagan used to pull the US out of a decade-long stagnation slump where high inflation eroded the buying power of Americans. Instead of cutting taxes (especially capital gains taxes) and reducing regulation to entice new investment, Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats chose to chase a government takeover of health care, a massive tax on energy production that would penalize expansion and growth, and expanding the jurisdiction on Wall Street of the same agencies that had watched the collapse come and did nothing about it.
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.”
Anybody want dessert?
