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Authors, sign in!Pres.-elect Obama has generally gotten good reviews on his cabinet choices. Hillary Clinton at State has been a hit with both the pundits and the public -- 71% support it. Secretary of Labor-designate Hilda Solis has received high marks from labor. Others -- Napolitano, Richardson, Daschle, Shinseki, Chu, Salazar -- seem to be sharp appointments as well and have been widely praised.
That economic team, however, worries me. Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary-designate, was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- from the heart, in other words, of the financial establishment that has very nearly wrecked the entire country.
His National Economic Council director will be Larry Summers -- "a libertarian who thinks unions cause unemployment," says Cannonfire, and who is widely known to have a massive ego. He's the fellow who got bounced out of the Harvard presidency because he said that women were inherently bad at math, which, one must say, would be clueless for a elementary school teacher, let alone the president of Harvard.
I know very little about Austan Goolsbee, who supposedly has Obama's economic policy ear, but the fact that he eulogized Milton Friedman in the New York Times cannot be a good sign. The Pres.-elect has tapped Paul Volcker to be Economic Recovery Advisory Board Chairman. Volcker, some will remember, worked for Reagan. His economic policies brought on one of the worst recessions of the past 70 years.
One wants to be positive, but this doesn't strike me as the kind of economic team we need ever, but especially when the country faces the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Volcker is known as the Great Slayer of Inflation. What good is that at a time when our main worry should be deflation, not inflation? Frankly, inflation would be good thing right now. Better to have more money chasing less goods than more goods chasing less money.
This economic team looks remarkably like the same type of folks who got us into the worst economic mess we've had in decades. We don't need the same Ronald Reagan/Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand policies that have very nearly ruined this country. We need Franklin Delano Roosevelt policies to build back up what they have destroyed.
Published December 22, 2008 by John Petty |
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Barack Obama
Economy
Franklin Roosevelt
Hillary Clinton
Jobs
Recession
Ronald Reagan
