Obama’s go-to guys botched economic recovery. Why do they still have jobs?
Barack Obama thinks Ivy League grads who’ve worked on Wall Street have all the answers, which is why he ended up depending on Laurence Summers and Timothy Geithner to pull the country out of its economic tailspin and, arguably, why so many Americans still can’t find work.
According to Timothy Geithner, America is on a path back to growth.
According to The New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Summers disagreed with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, over the size of the stimulus bill before it was proposed in 2009. Romer, like Paul Krugman and many other economists, thought the package would have to be worth more than $1 trillion in order to fuel a long-term recovery. But Summers and Geithner, along with Rahm Emanuel, feared congressional opposition and advised the boss to go with what became a $787 billion bill. So here we are with a recovery that has sputtered to a halt and a jobless rate that’s holding steady.
Romer reportedly will resign next month. As TalkLeft put it, “If Obama fails politically, the cause will be his policy failure regarding the size of the stimulus — when he listened to Geithner and Summers instead of Christina Romer.”
Odd Man Out 
Christina Romer is no more enlightened than Summers or Geitner. This woman has made some of the most stupid comments heard anywhere as she slavishly defended the indefensible in dealing with this sinking economy. The rats indeed are abandoning this sinking economic ship. Now if we could only get Geitner, Summers and a few others to do the same we might have a chance to pull out some kind of fiscal recovery.
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Thanks for reading, and for your comments. You’re right, of course, about Romer having said and done some stupid things while working for Obama. (For example, her future deficits projection was way off.) But she was right to contradict Summers when he said the recession was over, and I think she was right in saying that the stimulus bill should have been more ambitious. My main point was that Summers and Geithner, the Wall Streeters, seem to be totally in charge of Obama’s economic policy, to the point where he defers to them. That’s bad news for all of us.
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