Goolsbee: Cash for Clunkers, home-buyer tax credits were mistakes
Hot Air ^ | October 22,2011 | Ed Morrissey
Posted on October 22, 2011 2:08:02 PM EDT by Hojczyk
Barack Obama told Jake Tapper on Monday that “I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones” on economic policy. One of the architects of Obamanomics disagreed just a few days later. Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s key economic advisers, admitted on Thursday’s Morning Joe that the gimmicky, short-term stimulus approach was a failure:
Former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Thursday that if given a second chance he would not have backed the Cash for Clunkers program or the home buyer tax credit passed in 2009 to stave off further economic distress.
“Because we didn’t know if [economic recovery was] going to be short or long,” the Obama administration tried measures to address both scenarios, Goolsbee explained on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“If you look at Cash for Clunkers or the first home buyer tax credit, they were geared to trying to shift [recovery] from 2010 into 2009. Given it’s taken this long [to recover], I don’t think you would do that short-run stuff,” Goolsbee added.
Goolsbee, the former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the administration misjudged how quickly the country could recover from the economic damage of the 2008 economic collapse.
Goolsbee’s admission completely destroys the notion that Obama made all the right decisions on the economy, but he’s still missing one key point. The economic “recovery” hasn’t been this bad because the recession was so deep; it’s been this bad because the policies he and Obama have pursued and are continuing to pursue will produce no other result.
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