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The Spectacle Blog
A lot of left-leaning commentators have expressed outrage over this Washington Post tidbit about Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s role in discouraging more stimulus bills:
The economic team went round and round. Geithner would hold his views close, but occasionally he would get frustrated. Once, as Romer pressed for more stimulus spending, Geithner snapped. Stimulus, he told Romer, was “sugar,” and its effect was fleeting. The administration, he urged, needed to focus on long-term economic growth, and the first step was reining in the debt.
Wrong, Romer snapped back. Stimulus is an “antibiotic” for a sick economy, she told Geithner. “It’s not giving a child a lollipop.”
The problem is that Geithner could be so dumb as to think stimulus was merely “sugar.”
Whereas I think that the fact that our very top economic policymakers discuss such sweeping, complex issues in the simplest of metaphors is itself a huge problem.
Also, if Geithner was so wrong and Romer is so right (as per, for instance, Krugman), it’s worth noting that with antibiotics, a little goes a long way.
View all comments (5) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/06/09/geithner-vs-romer-in-metaphors
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ncatty| 6.9.11 @ 12:35PM
Stimulus is more like dope.
Thomas Paine| 6.9.11 @ 1:19PM
But in this case, Geithner was right!
Sugar = sugar high, sugar crash. In this case, we didn't get that high, eh?
Watch for double dip.
Oldefarte| 6.9.11 @ 4:27PM
He's STUPID and so are the whole bunch of these morons now running our country into the ground!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oldefarte| 6.9.11 @ 4:25PM
NEITHER or ALL of them are WORTH AN EXCREMENT! He's the one recently beating his boss' drum for an increase in the debt limit. Wow, golly, gee, we have our Treasure Secretary doing thus, our former [imbicilic] head of the Council of Economic Advisors recommending such [and her replacement, who is also totally imcompetitent and headed back to his Chicago teaching post-a typical moronic egghead teacher], a Fed chairman totally caving into the president and attempting with monetary policy to do what his boss' fiscal non-stimulus failed to do [while bankrupting future generations with wasteful spending], congressional liberal Democrats texting lewd images of themselves to various females instead of performing the congressional jobs that they're paid to do by TAXPAYERS, and you wonder why the rational citizens of this country are not collectively beating their heads against brick wall somewhere!!!!!!!
TrueBlue| 6.9.11 @ 6:33PM
Nah, then you'd have to fix the wall. Find a steel door or something, the dents won't really affect the use and you'll save money!