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Rep. Paul Ryan versus Goolsbee

For an academic, Goolsbee has a bad habit of either just following Democratic talking points or just making things up. Points that I know he is sufficiently smart enough not to believe. In the transcript below he has no problem attacking Romney for a company going under after Romney had left Bain, and fails to acknowledge the inaccuracy of his attacks. Ryan's comment was about the large portion of government money going to Obama supporters, not that all of it did. Goolsbee's reference to a single McCain supporter is completely irrelevant. The hope that "the Obama philosophy [is] to try to transform the government into only picking winners" is something that I can't believe Goolsbee believes. How does it address the question of what is actually happening? Why does Goolsbee believe that the government will have a higher success rate than private individuals investing their own money? Even Wallace finds it necessary to bring Goolsbee back on track. The transcript from Fox News Sunday is available here:

WALLACE: But let me just ask you, sir, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital did, and what lots of money, millions of dollars into this steel industry, the time when the steel was in trouble, what's wrong with that?

GOOLSBEE: Well, it depends on how they did it. And as I say, they ought to turn over the annual records of the company.If you want to establish they did not have kind of a leverage buy out mentality of pulling the resources out of the company -- turn over the records and let the people see what the business record was. Don't just pick two or three companies that are the success stories and say look at these because that invites the ones that went wrong.In this case, the company did horribly but the investors did great. So, I think it's a little bit different than a normal investor philosophy which if we can turn the company around in a positive way, we benefit. This was the case where they canceled the pension, they drove the company into the ground but the investors from Bain actually profited a great deal.

WALLACE: Let me follow up with Congressman Paul Ryan.Because the Obama campaign says the point of Romney economics is to make money for Bain, to make money for their investors, even if all of the workers get wiped out. And in this particular case, with the steel mill in Kansas City, the workers and that plant went bankrupt. The 750 workers were laid off and Bain did make millions of dollars in profits.

RYAN: You know what's ironic about this, Chris, Mitt Romney was running the Olympics during this time. He wasn't even running Bain during the time period in question.I think the individual if I'm not mistaken who was running Bain is a big Obama contributor.But for the point, Chris, what Bain did was they used private capital to help struggling businesses. What President Obama is doing is he's gambling with taxpayer money and giving money to corporate contributors, to campaign contributors like Solyndra and he's losing taxpayer money.So, what we have in the Obama administration is this crony capitalism, this corporate welfare where President Obama thinks it's right that we taxpayer dollars to give to private companies and take bets on these private companies. That's wrong.What is right is a private sector that you have risked that capital. You put capital in businesses whether they're struggling or not to try and grow those businesses, some succeed, some don't. On the net, when on Mitt Romney ran Bain, they were very successful. They created thousands of jobs, great success stories.But for the point, we don't think that the government should be in the position of picking winners or losers in the economy which is the result of the president's economics.
WALLACE: Let me --

RYAN: The result of it is, we have stagnation.

WALLACE: Let me let Mr. Goolsbee into that.I mean, what about the argument that, you know, it's the private sector. If companies want to take a chance, they take a chance. But the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.

GOOLSBEE: Well, that's two different arguments. The first one I actually think is a little bit cheeky because in several of these bankruptcy cases, you saw the investors profit by dumping the pension on to the government and actually getting bailouts from the government, which helped to cover the profits that were going to the investors.On the picking of winners, it is absolutely not the Obama philosophy to try to transform the government into only picking winners. By that I think Congressman Ryan is referring to things like in the midst of the crisis deciding to save General Motors and the auto industry.

WALLACE: I think wait a minute. Without speaking for him, I think he's talking about things like Solyndra. . . .

New National Review piece: Goolsbee’s Gaffes

AustinGoolsbee op-ed

My piece at National Review Online starts this way:

The Obama administration is having a difficult time explaining the unemployment rate, which has been above 9 percent for 27 consecutive months and is today 1.3 percentage points higher than it was when Obama took office. The October numbers, due to be released on Friday, are unlikely to look any better. So, his administration goes to great lengths to spin its own unique set of facts.

Just look at Austan Goolsbee’s Friday interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Despite having stepped down as Obama’s chief economic advisor in August, Goolsbee continues to do media shows supporting Obama’s economic policies. Goolsbee declared: “I deal only in facts, Sean.” Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims.

Hannity: We heard that unemployment wasn’t going to go above 8 percent.

Goolsbee: When they made that 8 percent prediction, that was the same prediction being made by everyone. But you forget the other half of the thing, which is if you did nothing, the rate would go to 8.9 percent, and it was already above that before the first part of the stimulus even went out.

Mr. Goolsbee is just plain wrong. When the Obama administration got into office, they made optimistic promises about their stimulus program, claiming that during 2009, unemployment would stop rising and then fall. The unemployment rate in January was 7.8 percent. In late February, the administration claimed that it would average just 8.1 percent for the year if the Stimulus was enacted. . . .

Alan Krueger, Obama's nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers

alankrueger AustinGoolsbee obamadoesntunderstandeconomics

Austan Goolsbee did his dissertation trying to show that higher tax rates didn't reduce how hard people worked. Obama's new nominee for that position, Alan Krueger, has a very similar set of beliefs. Krueger argued for example that higher minimum wages do not impact how many jobs are available for low wage workers. This guy fits Obama's view of the world and economics very well. From The Hill newspaper:

With the economy in dire straits in January 2009, Krueger, a Princeton economics professor, wrote that a consumption tax would be one possible tool to keep longer-term deficits in check as the government worked to stimulate the economy.

Krueger also stressed that he was not sure whether consumption taxes were the best way to proceed, only that the idea was worth considering. But he added that a 5 percent national sales tax could create an extra $500 billion per year in revenue “and fill a considerable hole in the budget outlook.”

“The prospect of greater revenue flowing into federal coffers would probably help lower long-term interest rates because the government would need to borrow less down the road, and further bolster the economy,” Krueger wrote on The New York Times website. . . .

Obama won't take responsibility for economy

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Here is part of an interview that Sean Hannity had with Austan Goolsbee. Personally, I think that this interview was quite telling. In response to Obama's broken promises, Goolsbee blames the bad economy and the high unemployment rate this year on the high price of oil, but when Sean brings up that there was high oil prices during the last year of the Bush administration, Goolsbee wants to have it both ways. Obviously he wants to say that high oil prices caused problems back then, but that has clearly not been what Obama has blamed for the problems in 2008.

Of course back in 2008, Obama blamed the high prices on oil speculators and promised a crack down to reduce prices if he were president. Of course, putting speculators in jail would make things worse, not better, but why isn't Obama doing what he promised here?

Corzine said Obama's plan aims to close the so-called Enron loophole, which exempts some energy speculators who trade electronically from U.S. regulation. It takes its name from the now-collapsed energy firm that benefited from the law. . . .

The loophole is "one example of the special interest politics that put the interests of Big Oil and speculators ahead of the interests of working people," Obama's campaign said in a statement. . . .

As the claims about earthquakes hurting the economy, I thought that all these Keynesians had been arguing that wars and other disasters helped. Remember Krugman's claim:

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. . . .

Other Democrats point to Hurricanes as a way to create jobs:

Gov. Beverly Perdue (D-NC): "obviously there will be some employment as people rebuild and prepare. This morning they said there's at least 27,000 or 28,000 structures that have an opportunity to be hit by the storm. So, we'll know by Saturday or Sunday. But all of us want jobs, but this isn't a way to get them quite frankly."

Goolsbee's interview with Hannity:

Hannity: What went wrong?

Goolsbee: Respectfully, Sean you are mixing up the time frame there. In the year 2010 which is when most of the clips when the president was saying we were going to grow again. We were growing and over that 17 months we added two-and-a-half million jobs.

Now, at the beginning of this year we get earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, European financial crises, now they even have earthquakes out of Washington, D.C. I mean, we've had a series of things that have put some heavy blows and slowed the economy back down again. But, I think it's a little -- I don't think you want to confuse something that is way down and starting to grow out.

Hannity: . . . He said that he was going to create millions of jobs. He said that he would cut the deficit in half. He said the unemployment rate would stay below 8 percent. Those were promises that he made as a candidate, none of which have actually come true. Are you actually going to make the case that the Arab Spring and the Japanese earthquake had a more significant economic impact than say 9/11 on the economy or Katrina on the economy?

Goolsbee: With the price of gas shooting up to four dollars a gallon affected everybody out and I was just very direct way.

Hannity: It happened in the Bush years . . .

Goolsbee: It happened at the end of the Bush years and then preceded the worst financial crisis in all of our lifetimes, so I don't know if that's necessarily the perfect example.

Hannity: Oh, Alright . . .

Goolsbee: We face a downturn where we lose a significant number of jobs 7, 8 pushing up to 9 million in the downturn. But let's not get into a thing where a guy takes your TV up to the balcony drops it off and says that the last I saw the looks fine. When the president takes office we're in the midst of what is now recognized as the worst downturn since we have had data in the 1940s.

Can anyone make sense of Goolsbee's statements here?

AustinGoolsbee Environment

So Goolsbee says that he agrees that "If the market wants to produce clean energy, it'll produce clean energy," but he acknowledges this despite supporting massive subsidies to get the companies to produce products that they wouldn't produce without the subsidies. From an interview with Larry Kudlow.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: . . . Now it seems like you're making fun of some of the alternative energy stuff, but if you look at China, if you look at Europe and if you look at a lot of the faster growing regions of the world, they're heavily investing in it.

KUDLOW: It's been a dismal failure in Europe.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: (Unintelligible)...alternative energy.

KUDLOW: It's been a dismal failure in Spain. It's been a dismal failure in Europe. I say, Austan, if the market...

Mr. GOOLSBEE: It seems like in China and Brazil it's been quite a success.

KUDLOW: If the market wants to produce clean energy, it'll produce clean energy. Natural gas from shale is clean energy.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: Look, I agree with that.

KUDLOW: I just don't see why we don't...

Mr. GOOLSBEE: I agree with that.

KUDLOW: ...call the EPA dogs off. That's one of these regulatory issues. Call the National Labor Relation dogs off of Boeing, Austan. In other words, some of this stuff, there's very little presidents can do. I get that.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: OK. [I don't think that Goolsbee is conceding anything with this last OK.]

Goolsbee on jobs: 'One month is not a trend'

AustinGoolsbee unemployment

The "one month is not a trend" claim from Austan Goolsbee has gotten a little old. Unemployment has gone up for three straight months and there is a good chance that it will go up again tomorrow. If it does go up for four straight months, can we call that a trend?

March 8.8%
April 9.0%
May 9.1%
June 9.2%
July ???%

Newest Fox News piece: Seven Myths About the Looming Debt-Ceiling 'Disaster'

AustinGoolsbee deficits foxnews ObamaDishonest op-ed

My newest piece starts this way:

If Congress and the president don't raise the debt ceiling, the consequences will be disastrous, politicians and pundits tell us, -- the equivalent of an economic Armageddon. And President Obama warns that the consequences are so dire that he cannot possibly tolerate any delay in making an agreement. He announced yesterday that any debt deal must be completed by today, July 15th.

According to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, failure to raise the debt ceiling limit will cause the United States to default and "cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.”
On Thursday, he renewed these warnings. And President Obama alarmed retired Americans this week: "I cannot guarantee that those [Social Security] checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

But the list of terrible things to come, if the government is stopped from continued deficit spending, goes on. Failure to raise the ceiling, it is warned, will dramatically raise mortgage interest rates, cause housing sales to plunge, create panic on world financial markets, and destroy the value of the dollar.

Austan Goolsbee, Obama's head of his Counsel of Economic Advisers, went so far this week as to blame the continued slow economic recovery on those few politicians who are against raising the debt ceiling. "[I]t's important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don't know that the government -- there are people actively advocating that the government declare it's not going to pay its bills," he told MSNBC. Yet, the slow recovery has been going on for over two years, well before Republicans obtained control of the House of Representatives.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that Americans oppose increasing the debt ceiling, by a 69 to 24 percent margin.
Mr. Obama dismissed this finding recently and, as usual, he believes he knows better. According to him, Americans just don't understand the complexities of the arguments: "Let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury (bond) auction goes. They shouldn't. . . . They've got a lot of other things on their plate. We're paid to worry about it. . . . Now, I will say that some of the professional politicians know better. And for them to say that we shouldn't be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. They know better."

But the general public is right. There is an overload from all the doomsday predictions. Earlier this year, before the debt limit was hit on May 21, the Obama administration already used the same scare tactics.

Here's a look at seven myths that the Obama administration is pushing on the American people: . . .

Obama at his press conference today was asked what he was willing to cut in spending (at 11:27 into the video): "You know, I am not going to get into specifics." At 13:20, "But if you are trying to get to 2.4 trillion without any revenue then you are effectively gutting a whole bunch of discretion domestic spending that is going to be too burdensome, that is not something that I am going to support." Note that this is $2.4 trillion out of $46 trillion.

Fox News has an online poll asking people whether the threat of default is a "Scare Tactic." The poll is available here. This discussion by Rove is interesting:

Note: I have been asked about the 14th Amendment claim. For those who need more than the link in the piece, the Supreme Court decision in Perry v. United States (1935) ruled that any legally incurred debt must be paid.

The Fourteenth Amendment, in its fourth section, explicitly declares: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned." While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War, its language indicates a broader connotation. We regard it as confirmatory of a fundamental principle which applies as well to the government bonds in question, and to others duly authorized by the Congress, as to those issued before the Amendment was adopted. Nor can we perceive any reason for not considering the expression "the validity of the public debt" as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations. . . .

Obama administration is concerned about uncertainty, but only one type of uncertainty

AustinGoolsbee deficits

What about all the regulatory uncertainty? Doesn't that count? The administration is so selective in its arguments. Austan Goolsbee doesn't seem to have a problem with these types of arguments.

"I do think it's important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don't know that the government -- there are people actively advocating that the government declare it's not going to pay its bills," White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, on MSNBC. . . .

Apparently, the "web blanket" statement is becoming quite the catch phrase with the administration.

Goolsbee claims that deficit "not materially worse" under Obama

AustinGoolsbee deficits

What can one say about this? Even after the bailout passed in late 2008, Obama was accurately saying that the deficit was up to about $455 billion. What is it now? $1.65 trillion? Goolsbee must have a strange definition of "materially."

The moderator, Bob Schieffer, of the third debate put it this way: "We found out yesterday that this year's deficit will reach an astounding record high $455 billion."

Obama doesn't talk about new jobs numbers, gets some boos from union workers

AustinGoolsbee Obama unemployment

Two years into the recovery and the unemployment rate has risen for the second straight month and is stuck above 9 percent.

President Obama didn't mention Friday's weak jobs report in his speech at a Chrysler plant in Ohio, instead choosing to talk about the recovery of the auto industry.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters on the flight to Toledo that Obama "will talk about the jobs numbers."

But one of the only allusions Obama made to the bleak report was when he said that "we're going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a hard time with." (The Chrysler workers, who make the Wrangler at that plant, responded by booing and heckling him.) . . .

Obama's Panel on Small Businesses filled with CEOs of large business and unions

AustinGoolsbee unemployment

Gooslbee seems to always be willing to say anything for this administration.

. . . Hours after the White House released a list of members appointed to the panel, Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was asked to explain why most of Obama’s appointments to the 22-member board are executives at big companies.

Goolsbee began his response by instead mentioning the names of Obama’s newest nominees to the CEA. “Carl Shapiro himself started a small business that he grew and sold to a larger business,” Goolsbee said of the deputy assistant attorney general nominated by Obama on Wednesday.

He then cited the January nomination of Katharine Abraham, reminding reporters that back “in the ’90s,” she had worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I think they have good knowledge about small business,” he said of Shapiro and Abraham.

Finally, on the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness: “Many of those names are CEOs of larger companies, but there are several small business members of that council,” Goolsbee said, not naming anyone specific. (There is one: Darlene Miller.)

The list of members also includes “union labors,” “academics” and “people representing many different industries,” he added. . . .

The Federal Government Destroys the Return to Pharmaceutical developing new drugs and now the government wants to develop new drugs

AustinGoolsbee healthcare socialism stimulus

Big surprise. The continuing threat of price controls has destroyed the incentives to invest in new research. So now the socialist Obama is having the government take over the Pharmaceutical company's role of developing new drugs. Not "intended to be competitive with private" firms? Be serious. Where "private industry has failed"? Here is the bottom line: Can government create as many new drugs for the same amount of money as private companies? If they can, that will be the first for the government. If not, rather than forcing the companies to charge low prices so that the government can "save money" and then have the government have to pay to get the research done. Why not just let the private companies keep their money and let them do the research?

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drug makers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson’s that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

The initial financing of the government’s new drug center is relatively small compared with the $45.8 billion that the industry estimates it invested in research in 2009. The cost of bringing a single drug to market can exceed $1 billion, according to some estimates, and drug companies have typically spent twice as much on marketing as on research, a business model that is increasingly suspect. . . .

“None of this is intended to be competitive with the private sector,” Dr. Collins said. . . .

Whether the government can succeed where private industry has failed . . .

UPDATE: "“Startup America,” the administration's new campaign designed to put the focus on jobs and inspiring Americans to think like entrepreneurs." Is this ironic?

As much of Washington kept its gaze on protests in Egpyt on Monday, President Obama's Cabinet sought to turn attention to “Startup America,” the administration's new campaign designed to put the focus on jobs and inspiring Americans to think like entrepreneurs.

“It’s quite clear that some of the biggest employers in the nation ... started in somebody’s garage as just an idea that they had,” economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said at the White House along with Cabinet secretaries and other members of the administration. “And whether you look at innovation itself and new ideas, if you look at employment, if you look at the growth that gives people careers – all of those things are tied to entrepreneurial ventures in a quite ... direct way.”

Gene Sperling, Obama's new director of the National Economic Council, said a bill for small businesses signed by Obama was “just the start,” calling the new policy measures a “top priority” for the president.

Austan Goolsbee has some explaining to do

AustinGoolsbee

Back on August 27th, Austan Goolsbee made this statement during an on-the-record background briefing on corporate taxes:

So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar businesses. . . .

The White House claims that this is publicly available information, but they can't point to where in the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board report that the information is available.

Mark Holden of Koch tells TWS that the White House's response leaves a number of questions unanswered. "My primary concern is, Why does our name keep coming up, why do they single us out?" says Holden. "They don’t respond to that. That leads me to believe that it is part of a campaign against us because of our political views."

The White House official's claim that "No senior administration officials have any access to anyone's tax returns" is less than an absolute denial of wrongdoing. Is it possible that a junior administration official had access to Koch's tax information and relayed it to a senior administration official? We don't know for sure. White House press officials still refuse to respond to requests for comment from THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Holden also expresses doubt that the administration official based his claim merely on publicly available information. "The White House’s statement doesn’t cite anything particular or specific" on Koch's tax status in the PERAB report. "And what we’ve seen in the publicly available documents thus far, we have not seen anything referring to us and our corporate tax payment issues.... Even if [experts who testified to PERAB] did address that issue, it wouldn’t make that information publicly available necessarily."

Politico has an email from the WH pointing to "testimony before the the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) and from Koch's own website," but neither source pans out.

So it is publicly available information, but the White House can't point to exactly where this data was available. Now today the WH says that Goolsbee "misspoke," but it seems like a bit of stretch to explain that he just happened to accidentally guess how much taxes Koch Industries had actually paid. I have asked the WH about both of these points, but I have received no response back.

This isn't the first time that Goolsbee has done the political dirty work for Obama (see also here).

Now an investigation is going to take place:

Obama’s press office wouldn’t say which of the PERAB’s witnesses made the claim — or why he would alert reporters to a potentially embarrassing detail about a company run by Obama’s political rivals.

In a letter released Wednesday and first obtained by the Weekly Standard, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George informed Grassley he had “ordered the commencement of a review into the matters alleged.”

Obama and the Democrats have long disliked the political activities of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

In an August 9 speech, President Obama singled out Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political group founded by David Koch in 2004. In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Obama said:

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don't know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don't know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

Unfortunately, Mr. Goolsbee's actions aren't the only ones involving the IRS in politics. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) wants to use the IRS to investigate whether Crossroads GPS (Karl Rove's group) and Americans for Job Security are violating any tax rules. Dana Perino reports at Fox News that one of the big unions were called and told not to worry they weren't going to be one of the organizations investigated.

Obama as anti-free market, is there even a question?

anticapitalist AustinGoolsbee ObamaAdministration socialism

Is Obama anti-business? Last week Obama defended himself against these claims. Now Austan Goolsbee explains that Obama isn't anti-business because (video available at link):

“There have been people criticizing the president, saying he’s a socialist, he doesn’t believe in the private market — that’s totally bogus." . . . “From the beginning and continuing up to the present, the president has always said that the private sector is going to be the only sustainable source of job creation and growth in this country, and that’s what we need to have.” . . . .

Ugh? What does the fact that the president says that most jobs will have to be working for private firms have to do with proving that he isn't anti-business. He wants to use government grants to business to determine what businesses will grow. That is pro-market?

Goolsbee blames the angry sentiments on: “When the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, and when you’re coming out of the deepest hole in anybody’s lifetime, you knew that there were going to be a lot of people generally upset and not feeling good about where they are. ..." Obama is surely anti-free market. He dislikes businesses, though he is happy to give wealth transfers to some of them.

Goolsbee also did an interview that just came out with the WSJ. He claims that Obama isn't anti-business because he "pushed through 16 tax cuts to assist small businesses and proposed additional incentives." The problem is that Obama doesn't trust businesses to make decisions. See also here.

Obama and Goolsbee keep claiming that this is the worst recession since the Great Depression, though Goolsbee claims that this is "the deepest recession since 1929."

Obama's anti-business attitudes don't just stem from his support for various price controls on everything from credit markets to health insurance. It isn't just that he is constantly attacking corporate officers for their excessive pay. He attacks insurance companies for being excessively concentrated and he lies about how concentrated they are.

Strong arming bondholders to get them to agree to forfeit their investments. Obama denounced Chrysler creditors as "speculators" who refuse to sacrifice as they should. Forcing the removal of auto dealerships that the companies didn't want removed and remove dealerships based on the gender and race of the dealers. After bailing out banks, Obama sought authority to seize any financial institution whose collapse might be "a systemic risk" to the economy. Attacking the profits of insurance companies and blaming those profits for the high cost of their insurance. He attacked doctors who give patients unnecessary tests or medicine as: "And it's driven from a business mentality instead of a mentality of, how do we make patients better?" What about calling Wall Street "fat cats."

His discussions with CEOs involve lecturing them: "He has held a number of meetings with CEOs, formally and off the record, but attendees I’ve talked to feel that although he listens intently, he rarely changes course."

Possibly Obama may go as far as claiming that the health care bill was done for businesses because he wanted to lower their costs.

Dinesh D'Souza is wrong when he says that Obama "isn't exactly a socialist." If he isn't socialist, he is fascist. Where private ownership is allowed, there is complete government control.

New piece at Fox News: Austan Goolsbee -- Spinning Like a Top

AustinGoolsbee Economy foxnews op-ed unemployment

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

With President Obama's poor record on the economy, it isn't too surprising that he would want Mr. Austan Goolsbee to put a positive spin on the current economic conditions. Mr. Goolsbee, whose academic work was known for supposedly showing that increased tax rates didn't affect how hard people worked, has now been appointed as the head of the president's Council of Economic Advisors. But Goolsbee has become quite practiced for his ability to "spin" the news, not for his accuracy.

We got a taste of his talents when he made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows rounds yesterday. On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Goolsbee . . .

"Former Car Czar Rattner Rats on Obama"

AustinGoolsbee bailout brokenpromisesobama governmentcontrol Regulation

For those who believed politics was involved in the decisions in the car industry, it appears that Mr. Rattner's new book will provide a lot of information. So much for Obama's promise not to let politics interfere with how the companies were run. Bold added by me to the discussion below.

-When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: "Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer..."

-Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.

-"[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup."

-"If his team had linked arms with the outgoing administration, as President Bush's advisers had proposed, billions of dollars could well have been saved."

-Rattner says Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual dictated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's schedule, public appearances and staff selections.

-He says Obama economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair as enemies who slowed down decision making with infighting

-Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: "Why can't they make a Corolla?" he has Obama asking.

New Fox News Op-ed piece: "Fact Checking Team Obama's Stimulus Claims"

AustinGoolsbee foxnews stimulus unemployment

My newest piece fact checks some of the Obama administration's claims and starts of this way:

On Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer interviewed Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist for the White House Recovery Board, on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus.

Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee's claims:

Hemmer: "What does the White House predict a year from now?"

Goolsbee: Let’s remember, you’re citing the claim that the unemployment rate wouldn’t go above 8 percent, but if you remember in that same projection they said that if we didn’t pass the stimulus it would only go to 9 percent, and it was above that before the stimulus even came into effect. What the administration and everyone else missed was the depth of the recession that was in place at the end of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009 when the President came into office.

In April, President Obama was busy touting the stimulus as having "already saved or created over 150,000 jobs." Press releases from the administration were already being sent out claiming saved jobs on April 1. Even well before that, on January 25, Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, promised that the benefits from the stimulus bill would be seen "within weeks" after passage. Yet, despite Mr. Goolsbee's claim, the unemployment rate did not rise above 9 percent until May, well after these claimed jobs were supposedly being created. . . .

The entire piece is here.

More rewriting history by Obama administration

AustinGoolsbee ObamaDishonest

Austan Goolsbee steps in it again.

Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic adviser, sparked the back and forth when he said Sunday that President George W. Bush had done little to force GM's turnaround, except give the automaker money.
"When George Bush put money into General Motors, almost explicitly with the purpose -- how many dollars do they need to stay alive until Jan. 20th, 2009 -- there was no commitment to restructuring, to making these viable enterprises of any kind," Goolsbee told "Fox News Sunday."
"I don't know why the Bush administration simply handed them money and shoved the problem onto the next guy."
But former White House spokeswoman Dana Perino noted Sunday in Politico that president-elect Barack Obama had endorsed the decision of Bush in late December to bail out GM and Chrysler with $17.4 billion in emergency loans.
Perino said if Obama hadn't wanted Bush to offer automakers money, they likely wouldn't have gotten it.
"If the Obama transition team had not wanted us to provide breathing space for the automakers -- with an express condition of future proven viability -- they should have said so at the time, and those concerns would have been given considerable weight and may have changed the outcome," Perino wrote.
The White House had no comment Monday.

Obama's Representatives make up facts about the economy

AustinGoolsbee Economy ObamaAdministration ObamaDishonest

The Washington Times has this. I hope that people see through their incorrect claims.

The Obama administration was out in full force defending the stimulus this weekend. The mantra is that the economy is getting better but Americans need to be patient to see progress. The problem is that, so far, there hasn't been any economic progress.

White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee promised on "Fox News Sunday": "It's going to take more than a few months to turn it around." That contradicts White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers' promise in January that the economy would start improving "within weeks" so long as the president's $787 billion stimulus was passed.

The stimulus actually has dampened economic projections. In January, before the stimulus was passed, 53 business economists and forecasters surveyed by the Wall Street Journal expected gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter (July through September) to rise by 1.2 percent at an annual rate. Predictions became gloomier after the stimulus passed in March. In May, these experts forecast only a 0.6 growth rate for the third quarter.

White House adviser David Axelrod told CBS' "Face the Nation": "The president was very clear when he enacted the stimulus ... unemployment was going to go up and go up for some time." We only find administration officials back then warning about unemployment rates if the stimulus didn't pass. The stimulus did pass, and unemployment rose to 9.4 percent in May. . . . .

The AP gets this right with the title "Obama repackages stimulus plans with old promises":

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama assured the nation his recovery plan was on track Monday, scrambling to calm Americans unnerved by unemployment rates still persistently rising nearly four months after he signed the biggest economic stimulus in history.
Obama admitted his own dissatisfaction with the progress but said his administration would ramp up stimulus spending in the coming months. The White House acknowledged it has spent only $44 billion, or 5 percent, of the $787 billion stimulus, but that total has always been expected to rise sharply this summer.
"Now we're in a position to really accelerate," Obama said.
He also repeated an earlier promise to create or save 600,000 jobs by the end of the summer.
Neither the acceleration nor the jobs goal are new. Both represent a White House repackaging of promises and projects to blunt criticism that the effects haven't been worth the historic price tag. And the job estimate is so murky, it can never be verified.
The economy has shed 1.6 million jobs since the stimulus measure was signed in February, far overshadowing White House announcements estimating the effort has saved 150,000 jobs. Public opinion of Obama's handling of the economy has declined along with the jobs data. . . . .
By now, according to earlier White House economic models, the nation's unemployment rate should be on the decline. The forecasts used to drum up support for the plan projected today's unemployment would be about 8 percent. Instead, it sits at 9.4 percent, the highest in more than 25 years. . . . .

New Op-ed at Fox News: Obama's Driving the Car Now

AustinGoolsbee op-ed Regulation

The piece starts off this way:

In a truly unprecedented move, the Obama administration has gotten into hand picking the CEO of a private company. This has never happened in US history. It is also something that doesn't seem to have occurred in leftist Europe at least since World War II.

Obama claimed Monday that he has "no interest or intention" of running the auto industry. But, whatever Obama's rhetoric, it is now his industry. Picking CEOs is just the surface. In Obama's speech he boasted that "my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan," but who is Obama kidding? These are not suggestions, these are orders. When Obama claims that he is "absolutely committed . . . to meet one goal . . . building the next generation of clean cars," his top down industrial policy doesn't care that hybrid sales have fallen by two-thirds since April, much faster than overall car sales.

Obama is even micromanaging Chrysler's merger talks with Fiat -- for example, determining what Fiat engines will be built in the United States. . . . .

I wish that I had seen this when I was writing the piece. Of course, Obama has "no interest or intention" of running the auto industry.
Obama Orders Chevrolet and Dodge Out Of NASCAR - Car News

Or that I had seen this:

RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites because CNN decided to do an in-depth expose last night to find out if anybody on the Obama auto team has any experience in the automobile business. They talked to Austan Goolsbee, one of these economic advisors, one of these Ivy League egghead members of the Obama administration, and Blitzer's question was this: "Okay, you have 21 members in your auto industry task force. None of them have any real auto industry experience. Five of them are cabinet secretaries. Nearly half of your members hold economic posts. Seven have ties to energy and the environment. Even the Treasury's senior advisor on auto issues, Ron Bloom, has no direct auto industry background. One member of the auto industry task force is joining us now, Austan Goolsbee. Is that fair that none of you has any real direct auto industry experience?"

GOOLSBEE: I don't think it's fair. I believe that Ron Bloom does have a significant amount of auto experience and that is within the government task force. The other thing that I'd say is the president made clear in his remarks, the US government is not trying to get into the business of running an automobile company.

RUSH: Oh.

GOOLSBEE: The intention here is to create the conditions that will be a bridge allowing these companies to restructure and become viable enterprises again --

BLITZER: Do you know...?

GOOLSBEE: -- in the future.

BLITZER: Do you know off the top of your head what Ron Bloom's auto experience industry was?

GOOLSBEE: Umm... I... No, I don't know exact-- I believe that it was, uhhh, advising the unions and in working in the auto industry, but I'm (pause) not an auto executive so I... That's not my area.

BLITZER: All right. We're going to double-check that.

RUSH: Way to go, Wolf. Way to be on the case out there, baby. The original premise is fine. There's nobody on this task force has the slightest idea how to build a car. There's nobody on this task force that loves cars. There's nobody on this task force that is a car guy. They're all a bunch of brainiac eggheads, and they're over there to assert control. So Blitzer then says, "Well, look, has the White House been involved in the compensation package of Rick Wagoner, GM?"

GOOLSBEE: I don't know the details on that.

BLITZER: Would that be something logical, though? Would that be -- given the enormous amount of taxpayer money going into GM?

GOOLSBEE: Uh, I'm not going to speculate on those matters. I don't know anything about it.

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