The Kraut was not on "Sunday News." Not worth watching without him.
Krauthammer's Take [NRO Staff]
From Friday's Fox News All-Stars.
On Christina Romer's statement that the stimulus would have little effect in 2010:
The administration was trying to explain away for months why it spends almost $1 trillion and there is no effect — [with] numbers showing increasing unemployment relentlessly.
So the line was: Well, it's kicking in next year, it will all kick in next year.
And now we get the chief economist at the White House telling us that it's already had its effect and next year it [the stimulus' effect] will plateau and won't have any effect on unemployment.
And you can only conclude that the stimulus is a bust. There's no other conclusion. If it didn't have its effect this year, and it's not going to have an effect next year, then it had no effect — and we wasted $1 trillion.
On the administration claim that the stimulus saved 600,000 to 1,000,000 jobs:
That is angels on the head of a pin. This idea of saved jobs is completely unempirical. There's no way to show it in any way in any model. It is an invention.
What you do is you look at real numbers. The real numbers show a radical increase in unemployment, and we're told it is going to remain that way….
One thing that we know it did do which is indisputable, it added $1 trillion dollars on our deficit which will have an effect on unemployment in the future because it will increase our debt service.
On former Vice President Cheney's criticism of Obama's foreign policy:
The history of this decision [on Afghanistan] is less important than the fact that the president is agonizing in public. A president ought to think long and hard about a strategy about war. There is nothing wrong with that.
But agonizing in public, leaving allies hanging — as we saw in the NATO meeting today, where all the others are waiting to hear what the United States is going to do — leaving the Afghans hanging, leaving everybody in Pakistan hanging … is a mistake.
If you want to have a private consultation, do it, but it's Obama's own strategy and he's responsible, and if he wants a reconsideration, it should be done in quiet …
The Corner on National Review Online (26 October 2009)
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