Behind the Eight Ball

Sadly, in this economic crisis Bush was frozen at the controls, and now Obama is consistently slow to act and always a step behind the unfolding situation.

Here is a graph and some words from a Greg Mankiw blog:

When the Obama stimulus plan was proposed, the president's economic team put out a report in January 2009 that purported to show what would happen with and without the fiscal stimulus. The chart above is from page four that report, together with the actual results over the past couple months. As you can see, the actual outcome is significantly worse than the projection with the stimulus plan and is, in fact, roughly on track with what was projected without the stimulus.

What does this mean? One interpretation is that the fiscal stimulus has failed to achieve what Team Obama thought it would. Another interpretation is that the baseline was worse than they believed at the time. I am confident the report authors would adopt the second interpretation.

Mankiw is a Harvard economist, a critic on the right, and was Bush's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He wants to see Obama fail. I don't.

I don't agree with Mankiw's claim that Obama is "not accountable". I do agree with his complaint that Obama is behind the eight ball.

If you look at the two data points that Mankiw added to the above graph you can see that unemployment is already well above the "with recovery plan" and "without recovery plan" projections. In short, this economic downturn is worse than expected. And it continues to be worse that Obama is willing to face.

Partly Obama is boxed in by the rabid right wing Republicans and by the conservative Democrats. But Obama needs to rally the American population behind a big push to turn around the crumbling economy. Obama needs to get out front and lead. I just don't see that he is doing enough. That, to me, means needless pain and suffering for the American people. Obama is 1000% better than Bush, but he still is too "middle of the road" and "conservative" to really face up to the crisis. That is a tragedy.