Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, comes from the empirical school of economic thought: He rejects ideology and hifalutin theories in favor of cold, hard data. He believes in what works. Or what he thinks will work. Or is told will work.
| *sigh* Dana Milbank is getting folksy again. |
His methodical approach has reinforced Obama's own instinct to take the long view.
| That's 'cause he's smarter than all o' us put together, poor man. How it must pain him just to be in the same universe with the rest of us. |
The ideologues. The bad people. The ones put there by The One.
| Waitaminit -- really, really smart people don't panic, they plan. Why on earth would Mr. Milbank say such a thing? |
Hey! Who knows? Without Austen, the "stimulus" might've been $3 trillion.
| So he's saying that President Obama is Professor Goolsbee's puppet, and without the good professor he'll swing thoughtlessly from panic to panic? Surely not. |
| Racists! |
And they say Sarah Palin says stoopid things.
Obama has heeded Goolsbee's counsel ever since -- forgiving him when he caused a kerfuffle during the 2008 campaign over Obama's position on NAFTA -- and reportedly was not thrilled with Goolsbee's decision to return to Chicago. That's understandable: Obama's middle-of-the-road
Better slogans. He needs better slogans. Somebody get him a Slogans Czar!
Goolsbee endorsed many of the
The only one who said it was the only option was The One who won.
But now the data
And the recession ended two years ago.
The most efficient way to produce jobs, then, is to give the private sector incentives to spend its big pile of cash on new hires.
Whoa! Wotta concept! Who thunk that one up? Goolsbee himself?
That's why Obama, on Wednesday, was at a community college in Northern Virginia touting little-known policies such as "Skills for America" and the Workforce Investment Act.
Why are they "little known"? Where are the Zero-compliant media drones when you need them?
But as a political argument, this isn't as clean as the opposition's simple prescription -- huge tax and spending cuts --
Oops! We forgot the slashing of regulations!
or the calls from economists on the left for another massive stimulus. Goolsbee doesn't object to either idea as a matter of ideology; he looks at the data and finds that neither would boost employment as much as what Obama is doing.
Which is little known.
With the disaster in Japan, the debt crisis in Europe, the spike in gas prices and
Goolsbee was born in Waco, Texas,[and] was raised primarily in Whittier, California [home of Richard Nixon]. [However....] He received both his B.A. and M.A. in economics from Yale University in 1991 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. [Both well-known bastions of moderate thinking. Then he became a professor.]