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PrintFebruary 14, 2010
Spinning away her credibility
White House Economic Adviser Christina Romer's latest remark on the Recovery Act underscores how desperate the Obama Administration has become to claim success despite the utter failure of its policies.
The Hill reports:
Senior White House economist Christina Romer said that historians will judge President Barack Obama's stimulus more favorably than is a public still struggling through an economic downturn.
"I think when we're through this, when scholars actually sit and look at this, they will say, 'My goodness, look at all of the trajectory, look at where we were going, my goodness, it would have been dramatically worse [without the stimulus],' " Romer said Friday.
Romer, at a breakfast with reporters organized by The Christian Science Monitor, acknowledged public frustration over the $787 billion stimulus, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's effort to turn the economy around.
In October, Romer testified before Congress the regrettable truth that the stimulus package added to the deficit, its greatest impact on the economy had already passed, and the majority of the money from the package would be spent this year and would "contribute little to growth".
Four months later, she is channeling her inner Prometheus to make a much rosier claim that the greatness of stimulus is so unfathomable at the present that it will require historians to grasp it at some unknown point in the future.
It's amazing to look at the difference between the facts one must present when testifying before Congress, and the fiction one can present to a small crowd of reporters at a prayer breakfast.
But we're not done.
Romer's remark also touches on one of the many items on the administration's list of unfalsifiable theories.
The administration continues to justify its course on stimulus because it believes doing nothing would have made the economic crisis much worse. Well, unless Doc Brown shows up with the DeLorean, we'll never know what would have happened if there hadn't been a stimulus package, thus we can't factually compare the two scenarios - a stimulated America vs. a non-stimulated America.
It's unfortunate that this faulty line of reasoning has become par for the course for a desperate administration that has less victories than the 2009-10 New Jersey Nets.
It's further unfortunate that a once-respected economist and professor has flushed her own professional credibility down the toilet for the privilege to serve as nothing more than a spin doctor for the president.
El fin
J.C. Arenas is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your comments at jcarenas.com
