I don’t think it’s any accident she resigns the day before another batch of rotten economic news comes out, particularly unemployment news. Gibbs said: ”These guys have probably packed a term and a half into a half of a term.’ Romer is the second member of the economic team to leave this summer. She follows Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. The early days of the administration alone were enough to wear the team down, he said, as they realized the depth of the recession.’
I don’t buy this at all. How much work does it really take to come up with three or four policies that essentially destroy the US private sector? How much work does that take? It’s very simple to do. A lot of countries have been trying to destroy us for years. And, look, in just a little over a year and a half, look at what’s happened to jobs, look at what has happened to the creation of wealth, look at what has happened to economic activity, innovation, entrepreneurism. Look what’s happened to it in just a year and a half. And even at that, with all of that, many of Obama’s key supporters are depressed and unhappy. They’ll never be happy because no matter what they get it’s never enough. But, my gosh.
Folks, if we conservatives had done as much and gotten as much of our agenda advanced in a year and a half as these people have we would be deliriously happy and we would be motivated and inspired, and the last thing we’d be thinking of doing is quitting. We would be running even faster, we would be hiring even more people. We would be so up we would not be sleeping. And now the economic team is exhausted? This is the biggest crock. How in the world can they be exhausted? ‘Rush, have you seen the hours they put in?’ Yeah, I know, Obama shows up at 9:30 in the morning, Bush got there at seven, Obama shows up at 9:30. They’re not doing anything. Now maybe, let’s be charitable and let’s say there are some people being conned in this administration, or let’s say there are some people who genuinely believe that what they’re doing is what will grow an economy.
These people are idealists, and some of these leftists do believe that this kind of stuff is what creates panacea, nirvana, utopia, and it has been suggested that one of the reasons there’s so much anger and depression on the left is that now they’ve got everything they want, they’ve got total control of the House and the Senate and the White House, and they’re getting everything they want done to one degree or another, and it’s not working. There is no utopia. There is not universal unity. There is not overwhelming happiness and contentment. The country is more divided than it’s ever been. Well, short of the Civil War. I don’t think exhaustion is the right word in this story or the headline. ‘Obama’s Economic team Exhausted.’ Obama’s economic team is defeated. Obama’s economic team knows they have failed. Whatever they believe, whatever their intentions, whatever their grand designs, it ain’t working. Folks, trust me on this. I don’t care how hard you’re working, if it’s working and if you’re having success, you stay at it, you can’t get enough of it. I love it, I want more of it.
These guys don’t want any more because it isn’t working, whatever their perspective. ‘But, Rush, but, Rush, I thought you’ve said that Obama wants this recession.’ Oh, he does, I have no doubt that Obama’s happy about this result. People still ask me, I get e-mails, they just can’t get their arms around it, ‘Why do you think that?’ Because he’s not doing anything to change it. This isn’t complicated, folks. Government doesn’t create wealth, government doesn’t create anything. All it does is redistribute wealth and destroy wealth. We’re seeing it happen right before our very eyes. Your house, the value of your asset portfolio, whatever, it’s down from what it was when Obama took office, big time, and it’s showing no improvement anywhere. And now the markets are breathlessly awaiting Ben Bernanke. The Fed chairman is going to have an announcement this afternoon and everybody’s wondering what he’s going to do. I’ll tell you what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna keep printing money, that’s what he’s gonna keep doing. They’re gonna try to flood the market with dollars and call that economic growth. That’s what they’re going to do.
What a lot of people are hoping — and, by the way, this is a pipe dream — what they’re hoping is that Bernanke will come out and suggest that the Bush tax cuts be extended. That’s what a lot of people are hoping. This is an economy in disarray, this is an economy that’s tanking, and those tax cuts that are going to sunset and equal a bunch of tax increases starting next January, look, there’s no recovery, productivity is down. There is no recovery. Everybody’s worried now about a double-dip recession. We really haven’t gotten out of the recession we were in. They may want to make a technical argument that GDP has shown positive numbers for a number of quarters. Fine and dandy. You show me the real or imagined or psychological evidence that there’s growth going on. There just isn’t. So they’re gonna choke off whatever is happening now with these tax increases that are going to happen in January, and I just submit to you that there’s nobody in their right mind who would suggest this is going to grow anything but the government, and government growth does not equal a growing, thriving United States economy or country. The government growing is the antithesis of that. As the government grows and the private sector shrinks then we’ve got big problems, and that is the trend.
So now we have this story, ‘Obama’s Economic Team is Exhausted.’ Why? They didn’t even have to come up with the idea. Karl Marx did all the heavy lifting here. There’s no innovation in this theory. It’s all from the communist manifesto. It’s all from the socialists. They haven’t had to do anything but try to implement it. What’s so damn hard? They haven’t had to think of anything. They haven’t had to theorize. Seriously, what’s the hard work here? What’s the Council of Economic Advisors doing? Are they sweating out the fact it’s not getting any better? Are they celebrating it’s not getting any better? Where is the hard work? What is it they’ve done that’s causing so much stress that they’re now having to leave? I mean it’s gotta be exhausting all the time. Recalibrating for the optics, like they have to do, conjuring up images, working the media, telling them how to spin disaster into prosperity. If that’s what they’re doing, then maybe we could say they’re working hard. But they’re not working hard on the economics. They’re just following the blueprint of Karl Marx.