Fortune editor Nina Easton reports today that Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has, well, interesting hopes for the the success of the stimulus bill.
“Within six months, for sure, you want to see that the recovery package is doing things.” The University of Chicago economist says he’ll consider the effort successful if the worst scenarios don’t come to pass, “if by the end of 2009 we aren’t looking at GDP numbers that are huge negatives, if unemployment rises to the 8% range rather than the 11% that some are predicting.”
The late and lamented Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famous for, among other things, his analysis that the effects of much government social policy was Defining Deviancy Down. Now the Obama Administration is defining the success of spending several trillion dollars as 1) “doing things” and 2) avoiding “the worst scenarios.”
Now that is indeed giving a whole new meaning to Hope!
UPDATE [15 Feb.]
Echoing the Obama administration’s less than rosy predictions about the likely effects of the stimulus bill, White House senior advisor David Axelrod said on “Fox News Sunday” today that “he expects the rise of unemployment to be slowed by the bill’s passage and implementation.”
Hmm. $787 billion, plus an odd $300 billion or so of interest, to slow the rise of unemployment?
More Hope!
