Surprise! Economic Numbers Are 'Worse Than Expected'

August 16, 2010
By Claude Sandroff

The current government employment report is just the most recent example of bad news for the economy expressed in depressing unemployment figures that the wizards in the Washington constantly find either "surprising" or "unexpected." Apparently, a critical member of Barack Obama's economic team, Christina Romer, has been surprised (if not ambushed) once too often by economic reality. Romer, Chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors announced that she was heading back to the UC Berkeley economics department.

Dr. Romer was wrong about every macroeconomic consequence of the $862 billion stimulus she touted. She was wrong about the depth of the recession. And she was wrong in her prediction that if the stimulus were enacted, unemployment would never exceed 8%. Unfortunately, we are now at 9.5% and, much deeper in debt. The massive stimulus program, a centerpiece of the Obama economic plan, was the just the first in a long line of unread, thousand-page bills produced by leftist dreamers.

Failed academic/government economists like Christina Romer, with no private industry experience whatever, surround our equally academic, reality-challenged, president in creating an impenetrable echo chamber of centrally planned government dysfunction. They're all surprised by how their theories fail in the real world because few of them have ever worked in the private economy, and they have no clue how government intrusion in the marketplace burdens the entrepreneur. the rest