Maybe now somebody will listen

Economists take over

I still remain cautious in my judgments of the incoming administration and its potential plans to aid our ailing economy. But indeed things like this make for considerable appeal. Someone willing to call out a stupid political gimmick as a meaningless economic gesture (the gas tax holiday) may be able to avoid doing most of the other political gimmicks that presided over previous economic problems (namely populist mandates such as price controls, further contractions of money supply, endless indictments and recriminations of CEOs, etc).

There are indeed some interesting problems emerging, in that it will be possible to use the economic injections to pass several Obama reforms in relatively unrelated areas, such as infrastructure or environmental infrastructure, neither of which will 'create new jobs' as is suspected. But there are tempting conclusions being proffered by these incoming economists and the elected Obama camp that suggest some of his campaign rhetoric was just that. Considering the general ignorance of the public on economics, it may even be possible to basically say we as a country are doing one thing (and harness whatever placebo effectiveness that has on the country's economic psyche), but do something different. This to me represents the scene in Idiocracy where Joe claims he can talk to plants in order to convince the dolts that water was needed.

It confuses me greatly where a large contingent of either major party is chronically anti-intellectual and thus virtually ignorant of issues that relate to empirical data (in this case, economics, but certainly the other major sciences can offer dozens of similar examples) and yet they seem still to want intellectuals to solve their problems. That strikes me also as a serious problem.