Excellent Economics Blog

Here's a good economics blog by an actual economist. This fellow observes that few serious economists of any political stripe are in senior Bush administration jobs. There's a reason for that - the same reason Bush's Treasury Secretaries are objects of scorn and ridicule: the mission of the administration (i.e., borrow immense amounts of money in support of an ideological agenda) is diametrically opposed to what a Treasury Secretary's goals ought to be. They didn't like the last one, they don't like Snow - time to bring in Chimpy, the ideologically-appropriate Treasury Secretarying lemur...

Oh, hey, remember that time Paul O'Neill said only nervous nellies should be concerned about the dollar falling? Here's Paul Krugman's response in 2001:

"In the past, deficits this large have always led to a currency plunge. True, one hears arguments to the effect that the rules have changed, that this time is different. Those arguments were presumably what Mr. O'Neill had in mind when he dismissed concerns about the payments deficit. Alas, it would be easier to take those arguments seriously if they weren't so similar to the arguments people used to justify the high dollar of the mid-1980's, just before it started dropping.

"More ominously, I heard exactly the same arguments especially the claim that rising productivity justifies a strong currency — used to dismiss concerns about Mexico's current account deficit just before the 1995 peso crisis, and again in Asia two years later."

Nice one, Paul.

But that leaves the GOP with a problem: who to blame? This is probably the way to go.