Citigroup, Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget — you don’t get any more insider-wonky than Peter Orszag. And he would like to take a moment today to warn you that it’s “too soon to celebrate a recovery.”
This is normally where I’d add something snarky about how folks outside the Beltway haven’t been popping many champagne corks these last few years, but I’ll demure this once.
So what does Orszag suggest we do to get back to the land of confetti and noisemakers? I hope you’re sitting down for this:
Policy makers in Washington should couple substantial upfront stimulus spending with even bigger, but delayed, deficit reduction.
Spend for real now. Unspecified cuts to follow. Scout’s honor.
Those cuts are nearly as real as the hair atop Orszag’s head.
Who do they think they’re fooling? Enough people to get re-elected.
Peter lived on my street for a stretch of the early/mid-1980s when his father Steve was on the MIT faculty (zipping around in a Porsche 944, no less).
The Orszag mishpacha was legendary for its self-regard.
No question that father Steve was brilliant, and whatever self-regard he may had for his own capabilities in the fluid dynamics field was within reason.
But brilliance, relevance, and accuracy in modeling in the hard sciences and engineering is one thing — in the realm of market economics, public financial administration, and human welfare, surely we are not talking about anything with a reasonable basis for similar self-regard.
(See here, for example: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Tom-Sargent-Nobel-Laureate) (And here also: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Mathematical-Models-in-Economics-or-Tom-Sargent-Part-II)
For the son (Peter) to have arrogated to his own professional endeavors and self-perception the same or stronger degree of certitude as the father (Steve) is reprehensible enough.
What’s made matters worse is that, unlike his father, Peter couldn’t leave those of us in the pathetic, unwashed masses well enough alone.
We already know there has been no recovery.
It’s the Great Depression all over again, this time in living color.