Sunday, March 08, 2009

The Almost Daily 2¢ - The Audacity!

So much for our “new technology” president…

In a recent New York Times article President Obama states very clearly that he doesn’t find blogs to be a reliable source of information:

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

You know what I don’t find reliable?

Very obviously junk economic forecasts used as a basis for misguided and immensely costly public policy.

Take a look at this important chart from the Obama administration’s document titled “The Job Impact of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” published on the 10th of January in advance of the house and senate votes.

Notice that the “With Recovery Plan” unemployment rate was forecast by an obviously delusional (or otherwise untruthful) Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein (key Obama economic advisers) to “top out” at about 8% unemployment…

Well, as of February the official unemployment rate was 8.1%... so less than 30 days later and we are above the peak estimate for their absurd and fictitious forecast…

You see… the notion that their pork-laden deficit spending plan could prevent the onslaught of double-digit unemployment was more than unreliable… it was total farce.

This really gets to the heart of the matter… the Obama administration is no “breath of fresh air” on the economic front… they are simply “more of the same” Washington insiders with no sense other than the thirst for control to guide their policy.

In fact, they now appear clearly, as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put it recently, to have not let “a serious crisis to go to waste” when crafting a policy response that was short on immediate economic stimulus but long on longstanding big government objectives.

They have zero credibility (as the stock market has quite nicely demonstrated as of late) and I believe that soon it will be perfectly obvious to all how woefully unprepared and misguided the new president and his administration truly are.