Academic Legion of Economic Doom: Chart adapted from e21 Obama’s Egghead Economic Saboteurs by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2011 Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly. Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama’s “fresh-faced” University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.) Goolsbee’s primary task: translating all of the administration’s big-government theories for us dummies. As Goolsbee put it to his university’s student newspaper: “We’ve certainly seen in previous crises that it’s quite important to explain things to non-experts. The American people can confront any challenge if they’re comfortable with the approach.” And what exactly was the nature of Goolsbee’s vaunted expertise? Making money as a business rescue-and-recovery expert without ever having had to meet a payroll. Goolsbee, the 15th wealthiest member of the Obama administration, has raked in assets valued at between $1,146,000 and $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of $465,000 and additional wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to Washingtonian magazine. As I’ve noted before, the government research fellow and Obama campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime mortgages “irresponsible.” He preferred to describe them as “innovations in the mortgage market” to expand the pool of homebuyers. Goolsbee’s most recent “innovation”: the “White House White Board,” a weekly video lecture teaching everyone else how to hitch what remains of America’s free-market system to the wagon of the state and how much (or rather, how little) we should make doing it. He illustrated his grand interventionist strategy to pick and choose “Startup America” winners by drawing a trough of broken light bulbs (symbolizing entrepreneurial ideas) piling up in a “Valley of Death” because they lacked government support. A comical choice of imagery given the Democrats’ enviro-nutty ban on incandescent bulbs. But I digress. When Goolsbee joined Team Obama, the unemployment rate was at around 6 percent. When he announced his resignation on Monday, the jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent. Romer and Jared Bernstein (former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden) had predicted unemployment would drop every single month after August 2009 due to the Obama stimulus. Bernstein bailed on the administration in April 2011 for the sanctuary of a liberal think-tank. He’ll also now ply his failed wares as a financial pundit. These hapless command-and-control ideologues were preceded by Peter Orszag, who hung his “Mission Accomplished” banner over the White House budget office in June 2010 after fewer than two years on the job, and by former National Economic Council head and hedge fund manager Larry Summers, who was caught sleeping on the job — literally — more than once during his brief tenure. Summers packed his bags in September. He was followed by Princeton economics professor and former top Obama Treasury Department official Alan Krueger in October 2010. White House aides have lamented that the economic team is “exhausted.” Apparently, Obama is tired of hearing from them, too. The Hill newspaper reports that he has stopped receiving daily economic briefings that were once treated with the same emergency status as national security briefings. So, the central planners continue to be paid to fail — while their boss looks the other way at the destruction, whistling into what he calls America’s temporary “head winds.” Nice non-work if you can get it.
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Obama’s egghead economic saboteurs
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, will resign his post as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this summer to return to teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Goolsbee has been the face of the White House on economic news, and is a regular every first Friday of the month explaining the administration’s take on the latest jobless numbers. Goolsbee served on the three-member economic council since the start of the administration. He advised Obama during his 2004 Senate race and was senior economic policy adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign. He took over last September as council chairman, replacing Christina Romer, who left to return to a teaching position at the University of California, Berkley.
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Top White House Economic Adviser to Step Down This Summer
Porkulus: Cash for Tax Cheats by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2011 When President Obama signed the trillion-dollar stimulus law in 2009, he proclaimed that he was “keeping the American dream alive in our time.” The stimulator-in-chief failed to mention that billions would be spent keeping American tax scammers afloat on our dime. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, federal auditors reported on the latest porkulus spending gone wild. According to a new General Accounting Office audit (summary and full report pdf here ) conducted over the past year, nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. Among the tax-cheating federal contractors and grant winners who raked in stimulus bucks, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found: – Two social services groups with nearly $3 million in unpaid taxes each received more than $1 million in stimulus awards. – One nonprofit organization owed more than $2 million from years of unpaid payroll taxes, while at the same time its CEO made numerous trips to a casino. The group was awarded more than $1 million in stimulus funds. – One engineering services firm had a $6 million delinquent tax debt and was called by the IRS an “extreme case of noncompliance,” yet won a contract worth more than $100,000. – A municipality with a history of late tax filings and five periods of unpaid payroll taxes worth $1 million received $100,000 in stimulus money. – A health care company that owes more than $1 million in back taxes and has had federal IRS liens filed against it since the late 1990s received $100,000 in stimulus funds. – One security firm owed $9 million and was repeatedly cited not only for being uncooperative with the IRS, but also had been nabbed with frequent labor violations. It also received a stimulus contract worth more than $100,000. And this is just the tip of the Cash for Tax Cheats iceberg. The GAO acknowledged in its report that “the estimated amount of known unpaid federal taxes we identified is likely understated” because of rampant underreporting of income and because the analysis did “not include Recovery Act contract and grant recipients who are noncompliant with or not subject to Recovery Act reporting requirements.” The official response of the Obama administration’s stimulus oversight board? First, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board patted itself on the back for its transparency. Second, the panel dodged responsibility by sheepishly pointing out that “federal law does not prohibit tax delinquents from getting government contracts or grants.” As if the RATs couldn’t have exercised their own common sense to stop such plundering in the name of job creation themselves? Even if such a prohibition existed, you can’t count on the IRS to perform due diligence on behalf of the American taxpayer, either. Last week, the Treasury Department inspector general found that the tax police have failed to prevent fraud in the stimulus law’s energy tax credit program. Some $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners have been claimed — but the inspector general’s audit found that 30 percent of credit-claimers had no record of homeownership. The recipients included prisoners and minors. “I am troubled by the IRS’s continued failure to develop appropriate verification methods for distributing Recovery Act credits,” the Treasury Inspector watchdog said. Moreover, when the IRS wasn’t falling down on its job policing outside fraud, its own workers were committing their own stimulus fraud — by cheating the system and claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages . At least 128 IRS employees claimed the credit, according to a recent Treasury Department audit, yet weren’t first-time buyers or violated other basic eligibility criteria. Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, who has doggedly tracked stimulus waste from Day One, said, “ That such a huge amount of the stimulus money went to known tax cheats should be a wake-up call for Congress.” It should be about the 20th wake-up call by now. Obama’s notorious slush fund has redistributed wealth to prison inmates , flaky researchers, social justice boondoggles , infrastructure to nowhere , foreign companies , dead people and ghost congressional districts — not to mention $20 million in chump change to pay for campaign-style stimulus-hyping road signs across the country emblazoned with the shovel-ready logo. And for what? Unemployment remains near double-digits. Obama economic advisers Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein infamously vowed the stimulus would stay below 8 percent . Highway jobs have not materialized. Investor’s Business Daily notes that a new study by economists Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State “found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.” Indeed, the researchers found that the stimulus actually “destroyed or forestalled” a whopping one million private sector jobs by crowding them out with make-work public jobs and programs. Recovery.gov? More like Wreckovery.gov.
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Porkulus: Cash for Tax Cheats
Herb Allison has become the latest economic adviser to leave the Obama administration. (Photo: AP)
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Another One Bites the Dust: Financial Bailout Chief Announces Resignation
AP – Christina Romer, the departing chief of President Barack Obama’s economic advisory council, cast disagreements among key players on the White House economic team as a healthy part of reaching tough policy decisions.
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Romer says her White House departure long planned
(AP)
At NYT (FWIW), ” With Recovery Slowing, the Jobs Outlook Dims “: There is no more disputing it: the economic recovery in the United States has indeed slowed. The nation’s economy has been growing for a year, with few new jobs to show for it. Now, with the government reporting a growth rate of just 2.4 percent in the second quarter and federal stimulus measures fading, the jobs outlook appears even more discouraging. “Given how weak the labor market is, how long we’ve been without real growth, the rest of this year is probably still going to feel like a recession,” said Prajakta Bhide, a research analyst for the United States economy at Roubini Global Economics. “It’s still positive growth — rather than contraction — but it’s going to be very, very protracted.” A Commerce Department report on Friday showed that economic growth slipped sharply in the latest quarter from a much brisker pace earlier, an annual rate of 5 percent at the end of 2009 and 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010. Consumer spending, however, was weaker than initially indicated earlier in the recovery. Many economists are forecasting a further slowdown in the second half of the year, perhaps to an annual rate as low as 1.5 percent. That is largely because businesses have refilled the stockroom shelves that were whittled down during the financial crisis, and there will not be much need for additional orders. Additionally, the fiscal stimulus measures that have propped up growth are expiring. Proposals for individual programs like another expansion of unemployment benefits have been beaten back each time they have come up in Congress. “We need 2.5 percent growth just to keep the unemployment rate where it is,” said Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. “If you want to get it down quickly, you need substantially stronger growth than that. That’s what I’ve been saying for the last several quarters, and that’s why I’ve been hoping that we’ll please pass the jobs measures just sitting on the floor of Congress.” The approaching midterm elections, however, may harden the political standoff after Congress returns from its August recess. As a result, pressure will probably increase on the Federal Reserve to use its available tools to prevent a double-dip recession. Recent reports from Fed policy makers suggest the central bank has become increasingly worried about where the economy is headed. American businesses, if not American households, seem to be hanging on. Image Credit : Blogmocracy .
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Outlook Dims on (Obama) the Economy
