The left's media-echo chamber just got louder. On Thursday morning in a claimed exclusive, the Politico reported that "(Former presidential adviser and campaign official David) Plouffe will appear regularly on Bloomberg Television to offer analysis and commentary on political and business issues as they impact the intersection of Wall Street, Main Street and K Street and will lend his expertise to the discussion of technology, demographic changes and crisis management."
That day at his new place of work, in response to a "kerfuffle" over errors in an academic paper which showed that, throughout history, government debt levels have held back economic growth -- errors which the authors insisted in a New York Times op-ed did not alter the fundamental validity of their conclusions, Plouffe delivered exactly what one would expect of a "former" lead Obama apparatchik:
Trish Regan, Bloomberg: David, you know so many conservatives have pushed this argument of austerity, the need for reining in and controlling our spending, uh, because that's the only real way to improve our economy. How does this (aforementioned "kerfuffle") change the political argument?
Plouffe: Well first of all I'd say listen to (University of Massachusetts Amherst PH.D Candidiate) Thomas Herndon (another guest on the show supporting Plouffe's point of view -- Ed.). He would have been a great part of the data team in our campaign. You know, we won the presidency twice in large part because of the work of people under 25, and I've developed a motto: "Trust the Kids." This is another great example of this.
I think what it (the finding of errors that don't alter fundamental conclusions, though Plouffe wants to say they do -- Ed.) says is that straight-out austerity is not the way. What we need to do is take a balanced approach, which is we have to reduce our deficit and our debt. We ought to do it in a balanced way that still gives us room in the short term to make the kind of investments other countries are in terms of their science and research, medical research. It's just common sense.
So I think for those who say the debt is not a problem and we don't have to worry about it, obviously I disagree with that. The President disagrees with that. We have to get our debt and deficits under control.
But we can do it in a smart way. But if we don't invest, if we're falling further and further behind places like Singapore and China in terms of infrastructure, if our science, math, computer schiece graduates are further and further behind. If the technogical advances of the next century are increasingly elsewhere, we're going to pay a big price for that. So we need to do both.
Of course, Plouffe never said that the real "balance" in his approach involves higher taxes.
Herndon then followed, and concluded by claiming that "In the current historical moment, public borrowing is most likely the most effective tool wee have to come back the recession."
Note those last four words. If you go to the video, that is indeed what Herndon said.
What did he mean to say? Was it "combat the reccession" or "come back from the recession"? If it's the former, he apparently believes we're still in a recession. If it's the latter, he's admitting that 45 months after the recession as officially defined ended in June 2009, the economy still hasn't come back from it.
In terms of employment, he would be right about the lack of a comeback. Since World War II, the economy has never taken more than 21 months to return to pre-recession peak employment from an employment trough. Right now, we're at 37 months and counting since employment hit bottom in February 2010.
The government has borrowed an additional and all-time record $6.1 trillion since President Obama took office. If public borrowing was really an effective anti-recession tool, it would have worked by now. Yet Plouffe and Herndon want more, and more, and more.
Clearly, Bloomberg TV will move further left with Plouffe on board.
Politico notes that Plouffe, obviously disingenuously in hindsight, called the "the jackals." It's much closer to the truth that they've been best buds all along.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
