Is President Obama the victim of bad economic advice?
The evidence points to “yes”. The president’s economic initiatives – food stamps, manufacturing, infrastructure, raising the debt ceiling, appointing a new chairman of the Federal Reserve – have mostly ended in either neglect or shambles. After five years, the Obama Administration’s stated intentions to improve the fortunes of the middle class, boost manufacturing, reduce income inequality, and promote the recovery of the economy have come up severely short.
Despite this, the president believes he is negotiating his economic agenda with Congress from a position of strength, and almost every speech includes some self-congratulatory note about how far the economy has come.
Most recently, when answering the withdrawal letter of Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president who was an unofficially named candidate for chairman of the Federal Reserve, the president claimed that Summers was instrumental to turning the current economy into what the rest of us must have missed: a world of butterflies and unicorns.
Source: The Guardian
