No Clue

Wow.

Just how bad was it?  Romer admitted that no one at the White House understood the fundamentals of this recession, and how they just assumed it would behave like previous recessions.  And it might have done so, had the Obama administration applied the policies that alleviated previous recessions, especially those that Ronald Reagan used to pull the US out of a decade-long stagnation slump where high inflation eroded the buying power of Americans.  Instead of cutting taxes (especially capital gains taxes) and reducing regulation to entice new investment, Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats chose to chase a government takeover of health care, a massive tax on energy production that would penalize expansion and growth, and expanding the jurisdiction on Wall Street of the same agencies that had watched the collapse come and did nothing about it.

Romer, however, still hasn’t got a clue why a one-time expenditure of government funds didn’t make things hunky-dory: