I agree with Chris about his assessment of Orszag as being quite left-wing. The policies he went to the mat for during his 18-month term speak for themselves (stimulus and health-care reform, for instance). And yet, the story that is being written now is one of a fiscally responsible budget director.

According to the New York Times:

In recent months [Orszag] has espoused deficit reduction strategies in administration debates against those who pressed for more stimulus spending and tax cuts to keep the economy from slipping back into recession.

No matter how the history is written, for me, Orszag is the guy who wrote the lamest defense of the $7,000 difference between public and private employees’ salaries (not to mention the gigantic pension benefit gap). On the OMB blog, he explained the differences in pay by saying that public employees have more diplomas (probably implying that they are smarter) than private employees:

But the truth is that a comparison of federal and private-sector pay, even by occupation, is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector — even within the same occupations. When you factor in the education and experience of the federal workforce, there is no statistically significant difference in average pay levels.

Notice how he forgets to talk about the differences in pension treatment public employees get. It’s all about the diplomas. However, if that’s what we get for the diplomas, I would like high-school dropouts to run Congress.