Stakeout was blessed with lots of great questions for Austan Goolsbee, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the cabinet. We also found this priceless tidbit from an interview he did with Colbert on June 15, 2009: “A year from now we’re going to be in a very happy place.” Colbert: “Really?” Goolsebee: “Yes.” [see video at 1:40]
Apparently no one has pointed it out since right after the interview took place, not even Colbert — even though Goolsbee has been back on Colbert’s show twice (Oct 13, 2010 and May 18, 2011). In the most recent interview, in the full web version, Goolsbee can’t get himself to object to Colbert’s repeated comment that the “government has never created a single job.”
Unfortunately, Goolsbee didn’t stop for questions from us or any of the other media assembled at the stakeout.
Among the insightful questions we got in the wake of the awful Friday unemployment numbers:
Dean Baker:”How high the unemployment rate would have to rise before they start talking about stimulus again?”
Thomas Ferguson: “Why doesn’t the administration nominate people for regulatory vacancies? — Or whether he think cuts in Social Security have any justification given that the Trustees Report concedes the program is stable through 2036.”
It is remarkable that the response to the Great Depression was to create Social Security, while the Great Recession is being used as a pretext by some to slash Social Security.
Richard Wolff: “Why no federal jobs program financed by taxes on the rich in the manner of FDR 1934-1940 — is it just because the dependence of Democrats and Obama on financing from those who would be taxed? … Or, more provocatively: so is it then the case that only because there is now no CIO or Communist or Socialist party making gains and growing that you dont see any need to do other than pander to the corporations wanting less taxes rather tha helping the mass of people as FDR did?”
I think Wolff’s last point is critical and frequently overlooked by lots of people who have been calling on and off the last two years plus for a “new New Deal” — the New Deal didn’t happen because people asked for it; it happened because the establishment was terrified of far more radical change.
Timothy Canova: “Why rely on the private sector to lead the recovery? Is this a political assessment that the Republican House will not go along wtih any public sector initiative? President Obama was saying much the same as Goolsbee even before the Republicans took control of the House last November. Obama and Goolsbee have both said that it’s the private sector that must be the engine of job creation. Why no public sector jobs programs? We’re heading into forest fire season and there’s no Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). Like millions of Americans, Ronald Reagan’s father survived the Great Depression working for the Works Project Administration. Even during the Carter administration, hundreds of thousands of Americans were employed in major jobs training programs. With more than twenty million Americans either officially unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged, and many more millions of consumers under water on their mortgages, how can we expect the private sector to lead the recovery? U.S. businesses are sitting on more than $2 trillion in earnings with insufficient incentives to invest given labor market conditions.”
[originally published on Washington Stakeout on June 6, 2011; posted on posthaven Nov. 13, 2015]