Dr. Christina Romer, until recently the head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and one of the chief architects behind the nearly trillion-dollar Stimulus, spoke at the National Press Club yesterday admitting the Stimulus was largely a failure.
You can read more about it at the Frum Forum, but here are a couple of key nuggets:
Calling the economic recovery “insufficient”, she noted that a 0.6% drop in the unemployment rate still leaves unemployment unbearably high. “Real GDP is growing, but not fast enough to create the hundreds of thousands of jobs each month that we need to return employment to its pre-crisis levels,” she said.
The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus was meant to boost aggregate demand and get the economy going again. Estimates of GDP show that the United States is still 6% under its pre-crash trend, and that her plan hasn’t worked as expected.
“The United States still faces a substantial shortfall in aggregate demand… this shortfall in demand, rather than structural changes in the composition of our output… is the fundamental cause of our continued high unemployment.”
In her speech, Romer also mentions something we also knew was going on (besides the fact the Stimulus wasn't working): a second Stimulus bill also has been in the works.
Nice work if you can get it, eh?
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