Opinion

TheDC Opinion: Heckuva job, Larry!

Joe Tauke Contributor
Font Size:

Two weeks ago, President Obama sat down for an interview with Jon Stewart. During the interview, Stewart said that Larry Summers, one of Obama’s economic advisors, wasn’t doing his job very well.

He’s right.

Unemployment is still over 9%, and while George Bush should certainly be blamed for allowing the policies that caused this recession to happen, like allowing Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to control banking, Obama should be blamed for initiating the policies that haven’t fixed it, because he’s still allowing Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to control banking through bills like the aptly-named Dodd-Frank Act. That may lead to uncomfortable conclusions for some, but it turns out that those conclusions are part of reality.

Candidate Obama is not the same guy as President Obama. President Obama’s policies don’t work. I would hope that he finds some policies that do, because that would make me vote for him in 2012. President Obama is actually very far removed from Candidate Obama, because President Obama decided to hire and listen to people like Larry Summers, who did such a bang-up job at Harvard that the fightin’ Crimson lost a billion dollars on financial derivatives.

Some, like Larry, would say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Of course not. But the policies implemented by Larry predicted that Rome would at least be built, as evidenced by the predictions made by the charts created by people following Larry’s logic. According to Larry, or at least charts created by someone who believes in Larry, unemployment should be lower than it is right now. It isn’t. One could be forgiven for thinking that Americans might have more jobs if Larry found another one of his own.

Larry Summers can’t make the economy do what he wants it to do. Ben Bernanke can’t either, yet the Senate has repeatedly appointed him. Bernanke wants the economy to create low unemployment, because he’s mandated to do so as part of running the Fed. He can’t, unless you consider a 9.6% unemployment rate to be low. European countries have traditionally had similar unemployment rates. America has somehow managed to turn its economy into Europe’s.

But while Larry is failing to do what he wants to do, we all suffer. And the strange thing is, we indirectly have “hired” a guy who will make us all suffer. Maybe we should stop hiring that guy.

So yes, Virginia, and everyone else as well, our lives will be worse because we hired Larry Summers. Next time, perhaps we’ll fire him.