Goodbye and Good Riddance

Friday, August 6, 2010 5:13 PM by Renae Bartusch

Christina Romer, chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, announced yesterday that she is resigning from the position. The announcement comes on the heels of another release of grim economic numbers and it appears that perhaps Romer is finally tired out from 18 months of incessant backpedaling.

In a blog she published last week she says “We have made substantial progress from the days when employment was declining by 750,000 a month.” 

A long way? How could she possibly know? As we have mentioned before Romer herself has admitted the fabricated metric of recovery ("stimulus" jobs "saved or created") is actually impossible to verify:  “It’s very hard to say exactly because you don’t know what the baseline is, right, because you don’t know what the economy would have done without it.”
 
We've also seen Romer try to renege on the promise she made that the "stimulus" would keep unemployment from breaching 8 percent. 18 months later and the jobless rate still hovers almost 2 percentage points higher than that.

Romer also proclaimed the "stimulus" had had its optimal impact six months into the plan's disbursal.  A year later and a still-hurting economy illustrate just how often she's been wrong on this point.  However, Romer's resignation, after the departure of OMB Director OrSzag last week, may be a signal of what’s to come. Playing ringleader to the economic circus of government spending, it was only a matter of time before White house officials ran out of "stimulus" spin.

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