Economic Indigestion

Dana Milbank - Economist Christina Romer serves up dismal news at her farewell luncheon

I actually got to hear some of this mess, it was enough to give ardent left winger Dana Milbank a good deal of heartburn. Her cheery HS glee club delivery did add sort of an air of the surreal to the proceedings. She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things. Here is Milbank on the topic:

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: "Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare."

It must be a bit scary to even the liberal elite as they bask in the remembrance of that joyous time of Katrina, just 5 short years ago, when it was all so simple. The combination stupid and evil W was responsible for all that was ill. Through maximum press and political maneuvering, they managed to convince vast swaths of the electorate that what was needed was "change". 14 months later, the shining new "age of change" was ushered in Nov '06, as Nancy and Harry took the reigns of congressional power, and Dodd and Frank the control of legislation over our nations financial system. The evil W was the lamest of lame ducks, one last "declared to be a failure before it started" gasp in "The Surge", and happy days would be fully here.

A year and a half later, the financial system would teeter on collapse. Victim of a housing bubble exacerbated by Sub-Prime Loans and lax government oversight on one hand, and massive amounts of leverage from Wall Street on the other. To the Democrats, "sauce for the goose". The broad shoulders of W would do yeoman service as scapegoat, the likely shallow recession would be trumped up to "Depression" in the interests of electing the ultimate change agent: BO. Even sweeter, vast amounts of taxpayer money and debt would be transferred to the financiers that had bankrolled the Democrat takeover, as well as the Unions and any other group that was on the left side of politics.

Now in charge of the candy store, the joy of handing out free candy to all their friends is fading as the shelves become more and more bare. Clearly the world is unfair, the shelves ought to be automatically replenished by hard working conservative drones ... or something. For certain, the entire enterprise is a matter of extreme confusion to the liberal economists in the BO stable.