The incoherence of Obamanomics

Obama's Economic Incoherence

By Rich Lowry, New York Post

BARACK Obama spent all of 2008 running against the sputtering economy, and warned earlier this year of a crisis "we may not be able to reverse." Yet, as the unemployment rate climbs beyond the administration's projections, Vice President Joe Biden informs us that the administration "misread how bad the economy was."

Apparently, we were going to experience a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis comparable to the Great Depression without a particularly high unemployment rate. This was the promise of the Obama administration, which indulged in hair-raisingly alarmist economic rhetoric while pumping out unduly hopeful economic projections.

If the Reagan administration gave us the rosy scenario, the Obama administration has given us the rosy apocalypse. The rosy apocalypse is an artifact both of ideological naivete and
knowing cynicism.

The administration genuinely believed, against all historical experience, that government spending would boost us out of the recession. And it knew it had to assume an unrealistically rapid, robust economic recovery, because otherwise the already-horrid deficit projections would look worse.

So Obama talked up the crisis to get the stimulus passed, and after that . . . happy days again! If only the job market were cooperating. In a report prior to the passage of the stimulus, the soon-to-be head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, suggested the unemployment rate wouldn't increase beyond 8 percent. It now stands at 9.5 percent and will go higher.

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