Barkley Rosser on This Year's Winners: "Douglas Holtz-Eakin Falls Into Lunatic Panderin"g
Barkley:
EconoSpeak: Douglas Holtz-Eakin Falls Into Lunatic Pandering: Once upon a time Douglas Holtz-Eakin was a reasonable professional economist, if of a conservative bent and clearly associated with the Republican Party.... [N]ow Douglas Holtz-Eakin has fallen into lunatic pandering, I can only guess in the hopes of becoming an adviser to Sarah Palin or some other future GOP prez nominee who is equally out to lunch on economic matters. Accounts are given on Mark Thoma at http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/12/words-will-never-hurt-us-or-our-cronies-if-we-dont-allow-them-to-be-used.html a few days ago and today by Paul Krugman at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/opinion/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=1.
As one of the four GOP members of the financial crisis commission he has joined with the others in voting to refuse to allow the words/phrases "Wall Street" or "shadow banking" or "interconnection" or "deregulation" to appear in its final report.... DH-E and company have absconded to issue their own report that blames it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. As Krugman points out, the F's did not even get into buying subprime mortgages until 2004 and other countries without them or the CRA have had worse housing bubbles than has the US. This is just fantasyland stuff that is only taken seriously by, well, Fox News and the Tea Party crowd..
