All Roads Lead To Romer

IBD Editorials ^ | December 24, 2008

[Kaslin]

Economic Policy: Christina Romer as CEA head is one of Barack Obama's most pleasantly surprising appointments. At last, a Democratic president will be advised by someone who understands that tax increases kill jobs.

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How often do you find liberal Democrats interested in hearing that tax increases bring forth "a large, rapid, and highly statistically significant negative effect on output"? Or in taking in the news that "tax increases have a large negative effect on investment"?

Or that previous analyses in recent years of the impact of tax increases on consumption underplayed their economic damage and that a "new measure of fiscal shocks support(s) the view that the effects are large and negative"?

These are the kinds of findings we saw come last year from University of California, Berkeley, economics professor Christina Romer, the president-elect's choice as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., titled "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," Romer and her husband, David, a Berkeley professor of political economy, smashed the liberal economic orthodoxy.

[webschooner]

Doesn’t matter — Big Ear Socialist dewd will increase taxes anyway. More “crisis” means more excuse for more goobermint takeover of everything in sight.

[RedMonqey]

As it was said “Only Nixon could go to China”

So it could be about Taxes. Only Obama can teach economics to liberals. And make it stick.

For this alone Obama could attain “Greatness”