Talking Points on the designation of Christina D. Romer as the candidate to be nominated to the Senate for the post of Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:
- World-class expert on the Great Depression: if you want to avoid any of the mistakes made during the Great Depression, she is the one to hire.
- World-class expert on monetary and fiscal policy: encyclopedic knowledge of their history--since we need a CEA chair who knows more about stabilization policy than about tax or labor or industrial organization policy.
- Very good at explaining economics: great similarities between teaching Econ 1 and teaching the White House staff about economics.
- Very good at making people believe that relatively complicated ideas about economics are simple facts of nature.
- Bush moved the CEA staff out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building:
- A very bad thing because the CEA staff can no longer look over the shoulders of the White House staff and offer advice.
- CDR should demand, as a condition of appointment, that at least her two deputies have offices in the White House complex.
- A center-left moderate:
- But these are not moderate times. To be moderate now is to be radical. To be radical is to be moderate.
- A woman who taught her then-two year old that the answer to the question "Who should be president?" was "Bruce Babbitt."
Other appointees:
- Geithner, Summers, Orszag--world-class appointments; at least as well qualified as anybody else in the world for these jobs.
- Who is going to be the consensus-builder?
- You need a person to build a happy consensus among economic policy advisers.
- If you don't have a builder of the happy consensus, then you have a situation in which lobbyists, spin-doctors, and rogue vice presidents have points of entry in order to make bad policy.
