Vice President Biden said it very clearly – we “misread how bad the economy was”. That’s the good thing about Joe Biden; he just tells you straight, just like it is. He doesn’t try to finesse things or put the right political spin on things – he just blurts out the truth as best he knows it. It’s kind of refreshing, isn’t it? A day or so later. President Obama tried to correct Joe’s statement by saying “we had incomplete information”. Apparently Paul Krugman wasn’t suffering from incomplete information, nor was Nouriel Roubini. Back in January, Nobel Prize winning economist Krugman criticized the Obama plan saying that we needed a stimulus package twice as big as the Obama plan. Meanwhile, Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the worldwide economic meltdown, thereby earning the title of Dr. Doom and simultaneously qualifying for a Nobel Prize himself, also said that the Obama stimulus was insufficient. So how is it that noted economists like Krugman and Roubini had enough information to come out and say that the Obama plan wouldn’t be enough? How can the President of the United States have incomplete information? It seems that the truth lies more in Joe’s words – they just didn’t realize how bad things were – despite being told how bad things were by these preeminent economists. In other words they chose not to listen to Krugman and Roubini. I wonder who they did listen to? Geithner? Bernanke? Summers? In any event, they got it wrong and the time has come to correct it.
Now of course the Republican Party has a different opinion. The are more or less saying, “See, we told you a stimulus wouldn’t work”. Their plan is to just remove all the rules, regulations, and taxes from businesses and restart a free for all economy with no rules – the sort of thing created by Clinton and Bush that created the worldwide meltdown. Here’s an analogy: let’s suppose your house is on fire and the Obama Fire Department arrives with garden hoses. They spray water on the fire but it doesn’t go out. Then the Republicans show up – not the Republican Fire Department (because they don’t have one), just a bunch of gawkers who hang around sniggering and making comments like, “See, we knew you can’t put out a fire with water!! That’s why we don’t even try! Say, why not try gasoline? That might work!” The thing is this: we need firehoses, not garden hoses. It’s a big fire. Joe was right. So was Krugman and Roubini. Obama needs to admit it. They thought unemployment would peak at 8%. It didn’t. We’ll probably break through to 10% unemployment within a month. It could go a lot higher. Meanwhile only 10% of the stimulus money has even been spent. Do I detect a certain lack of understanding here? The house is on Fire!! Break out the firehoses and put the fire out!! Now!!
Meanwhile, perhaps the Republican “Fire Department” could just step back and keep out of the way. If you’re not part of the solution then you are part of the problem, and we don’t have the time or the luxury to start playing politics while our economy continues to go up in smoke. I’m glad Joe Biden gets it. He needs to have a talk with President Obama – a Joe Biden kind of talk – and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that we don’t need finesse right now. We don’t need to calculate the exact cost of the remedy and then determine not to spend a penny more. What we need is Stimulus Part II – and this time, let’s use the firehoses.
There’s a problem with your theory. It seems like every time Obama and his Liberals take an action that is supposedly meant to improve the economy, both the markets and industrial forecasts get worse due to the nature of those actions.
It really looks like – to extrapolate upon your analogy – that Team O is using those garden hose to spray gasoline on our burning house.