Orwell would be proud.
Orszag exit reveals deficit policy split (Financial Times free subscription required)
- Peter Orszag, Barack Obama’s budget director, resigned this week partly in frustration over his lack of success in persuading the Obama administration to tackle the fiscal deficit more aggressively, according to sources inside and outside the White House.
Mr Orszag, whose publicly stated reasons for leaving were that he was exhausted after years in high pressure jobs and also that he wanted to plan for his wedding in September, is seen as the guardian of fiscal conservatism within the White House.
If a $1.5 Trillion deficit is “fiscal conservatism”, what can we expect with Summers running the show?
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Other members of Mr Obama’s economic team, notably Lawrence Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, have placed more emphasis on the need for continued short-term spending increases to counteract what increasingly looks like an anaemic economic recovery in the US.
And here’s Dear Leader himself:
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“We worked exceptionally hard to restore growth; we cannot let it falter or lose strength now,” Obama said in a letter to G-20 leaders last Friday. “This means that we should reaffirm our unity of purpose to provide the policy support necessary to keep economic growth strong.”
Notice the use of words: “policy support” = a deficit that is 10% of GDP; “keep economic growth strong” presupposes that there is economic growth to speak of (as I’ve previously shown, there isn’t), and that we can cure our debt problem by going deeper into debt. Who believes the garbage this guy is shoveling?
In case you can’t read the photo’s caption, it says “German woman using money as fuel in her wood burning stove. During the 1923-1924 hyperinflation in Germany, it took less paper money to generate needed heat in the stove by burning money than it did to use it to buy wood to burn.”
Wake me when we audit the Fed.
