From Friday’s All Stars.
On the Obama administration’s optimistic economic growth projections:
You almost want to invest after hearing her [Christina Romer] talk. She sounded extremely happy about our economy.
It’s one of the reasons they don’t talk about a depression anymore, as the president had–when he needed a stimulus, we heard the word “depression” every six hours. It is not used anymore. After he got his stimulus passed, he now abandons all talk.
And the reason is, if Romer is right, according the administration’s projections, we are going to have a growth of over three percent next year. Now, that’s not a depression, that’s a recovery, and it’s quick.
What’s scary, however, is that in the quarter we just had at the end of last year, we had a dramatic contraction. The administration redid the numbers, it’s over six percent.
Which, on an annualized basis, is a contraction of a trillion dollars in American output in one year. That’s the size of the entire output of Indonesia or a Turkey, substantial economies.
And the projection had been that would be our worst quarter, our trough. It looks as if the first quarter of this year will be equally as bad or worse, in which case we are still are in what she called the downward momentum.
On Obama’s speech to the troops at Camp Lejeune:
What is disgraceful is he had a 20 minute speech in which he did not use the word “democracy” once.
The great achievement here is that we have established the only functioning democracy among the 22 Arab states. That is an amazing achievement-the most open society, a free press, a lot of political parties, free association, and free elections.
And he spoke only about establishing his sovereign Iraq. Well, we could have installed a general after the fall of Baghdad and left a sovereign Iraq. Instead, we slogged it out, lost a lot of good men and women in order to establish a democracy.
And he as Commander in Chief did not even acknowledge that.