Christina Romer (Larry Downing/REUTERS)
So it turns out that one of the former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers who signed on to that Politico op-ed calling for implementation of the deficit commission's unofficial, non-binding, failed recommendations is worried about unemployment. Too bad Christina Romer couldn't have gotten a piece of this into that op-ed.
“Shameful.” That’s what Christina Romer calls our apparent decision to stop worrying about unemployment and focus instead on deficit reduction and defunding public television and reproductive rights organizations. To see unemployment at 8.9 percent, she said at Vanderbilt University, is an “absolute crisis.” But we’ve slowly become accustomed to it. After all, 8.9 percent is better than almost-10 percent, which is where we were a few months ago. And it’s coming down, isn’t it? And aren’t we broke?
It’s true that 8.9 percent is better than almost-10 percent, but it’s not better enough. Remember that 8.9 percent was the disaster predicted in the Romer-Bernstein estimate> of what would happen in the absence of the stimulus. The recession proved much worse than they—or anyone—knew at the time, and so their estimate proved sadly optimistic. But it was only a bit more than two years ago that our best economists considered 8.9 percent a catastrophic outcome for our economy, a future that was to be avoided no matter the cost. Now we’ve relaxed into it. Accepted it. Both Congress and the White House are pushing spending plans that most economists agree will destroy jobs in 2011. Rather than doing everything we can to boost employment, we’re doing things that we know will reduce it.
Perhaps she did argue with her Council colleagues. If so, she must be tired of being disregarded. Remember, she had argued for a $1.2 trillion stimulus package, way back when. Which probably would have made some difference in that unemployment number.