U.S. Government and the Economy: Some Are 'On Message', Some Aren't

The current administration has been spinning -- er, working -- hard to convince everyone that our economic troubles are more-or-less behind us.

Like other politicians before them, they have relied on the propaganda technique of repeating fantasies and outright falsehoods over and over again in the hope that they are eventually accepted by the masses as reality.

In "Obama Budget Chief: Economy Nearly Bottomed," the Associated Press details the latest such example:

The worst seems to be over, President Barack Obama's budget director said Sunday. But he also warned against taking signs of economic recovery as a reason to celebrate or delay changes in health care policy.

Peter Orszag said the nation's economy appears to have bottomed out, even as the White House prepared to revise its budget projections to reflect higher-than-expected unemployment. He said an improving economy and changes to how the United States provides health care would help narrow federal deficits.

"I think what happened is the free-fall in the economy seems to have stopped and we're — I guess the analogy (is) there are some glimmers of sun shining through the trees, but we're not out of the woods yet," said Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. "We do have more work ahead."

To achieve the desired results, of course, everybody has to be "on message." Unfortunately for those who are orchestrating the campaign, some of those who should be talking the "green shoots" talk apparently did not get the memo, as suggested by Sunday's Agence France-Presse report, "U.S. Uptick Doesn’t Mean Crisis Is Over, Says Top Economist":

A few recent glimmers of economic hope emerging in the United States do not mean the global crisis is over, a top economist who advises US President Barack Obama said Saturday.

The crisis “is certainly the worst that I have seen in my career,” Martin Feldstein, a 69-year-old Harvard economist and member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board told a world tourism conference in Brazil.

“The evidence simply doesn’t support” the conclusion that the United States is on its way to a sustained recovery, said the academic, who also served as an advisor under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

He added that Europe’s economy is “equally bad if not worse than in the US,” and “Japan has been hit even harder.”

Comments

[User 353732:]

The task of the government is now both simple and practical.
It is to fool enough of the people enough of the time.
In practice, this entails fooling about a quarter of American adults(roughly 51% of the voters) consistently. With a servile and complicit MSM, which views itself as the "fourth arm of government", and a growing and captive client base on Wall St and in big corporations , the task has become rather trivial. Whatever the governing elites now say, is dutifully echoed by the MSM and that pretty much ensures that a quarter of adult Americans live in a state of unreality and untruth.
The government is not interested in fooling all the people some of the time: too much work and not much upside.
It also doesn't care that you cannot fool all the people all the time because it simply does not need all the people any of the time to stay in power.

May 18 06:02 AM

[Gregman2:]

Is Larry Kudlow working for the Obama team?;-) He's Mr. Green Shoot, despite the evidence.

May 18 11:28 AM

[AndrewBaker:]

The green in "green shoots" must apply to those who are bidding up the markets: no experienced investor would buy now unless they were day traders or short term imvestors selling into the rallys.

May 18 04:00 PM