There He Goes Again
I wasn’t at all being facetious when I asked if unemployment is a feature, not a bug, of Obamanomics. And here’s the next bit of evidence in support of my theory:
President Barack Obama, under pressure to spur job growth, said on Monday he had chosen Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger to become the top White House economist and that he will offer a jobs plan next week.
Yes, because nobody knows more about job creation than Big Labor.
Yikes.
And the message it sends to business is even worse. Hiring Krueger for the jobs says exactly one thing: Full speed ahead on Obamanomics. There will be no course corrections, there will only be more taxes, more spending, more regulation, more bullying.
The good news is, if you can call it that, it that there’s no one left who cares enough to listen.
Unimpressive, really. Big-O needed to go Full Monty and hire Robert Reich!
Full throttle on the jobs front. Which meaning of “throttle” is intended is left as an exercise to the reader.
“Labour economist” is not a dirty term – it doesn’t mean he’s a unionist, it means he studies the employment market. That part is fine, and frankly, probably what we want.
But here’s the interesting bit. For those who are unaware, Krueger is best known in economics for an experiment he ran in the early 90s that showed that increasing the minimum wage creates jobs. Yes, you read that right. It’s an immensely controversial paper in the economics community(if you want to know more, just Google “Card and Krueger”, you’ll get gobs of hits). Not that he’s a faker – his experimental design is exactly the same as I would have used, and I’m not aware of any particular flaws with his methods or his analysis – but it’s rather an interesting result, and not the sort of thing that makes me happy about an Obama appointee.
In addition to the “study” Alsadius mentioned, Krueger was one of the “brains” behind “Cash for Clunkers”. Result:
Destroyed a bunch of useful used cars, spent a lot of taxpayer money, and pushed forward some car purchases w/o actually helping the auto business.
Just hte kind of guy Obama would want. Just the kind of guy the Republicans should ravage in confirmation hearings, and then filibuster.