Just (Billy Joel and) Me, Talking About “Honesty”
November 7th, 2009 . by economistmomI think this is one of the coolest radio interviews I’ve done (click here for the link to the podcast)–not because of anything new I said that I haven’t said a million times before, but because Marketplace’s Scott Jagow did such a great job of prompting me with the right questions and editor Paddy Hirsch did a brilliant job editing and mixing my words in with a very fitting Billy Joel accompaniment (featured above, which does NOT contain me anywhere, by the way).
Thanks guys, for this awesome introduction, too:
Chop chop
Our weekly podcast, After the Bell, is now available. This week, the White House said its goal is to cut the deficit in half by the end of Obama’s first term.
Is that possible? Scott talks to Diane Lim Rogers.
Diane is well known to the web as the woman behind the popular blog EconomistMom. And by day she’s chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a non-profit, non-partisan group that lobbies for fiscal responsibility by government. They also talk about the need for honesty with the American people.
Music includes Wilco, Blackfoot and Billy Joel. If you’d like After the Bell to download automatically each Friday, click here.
Well done, Diane. One thing I wish were currently part of the answer to the question “What does Concord want Congress to do?” is “Establish the SAFE Commission” with explanation of why it could provide political cover to potentially move Congress and the White House to fiscal fiscal responsibility (sooner, rather than later and more painfully). As a note, I’d love to see a related comment from you or Bob Bixby at http://economy.nationaljournal.com/2009/11/a-brac-for-the-budget.php
You can’t be serious?!? California had a tangible plan to get back to fiscal responsibility (raise taxes even more) and that got shot down by the voters resoundingly. People are not willing to have even more money confiscated from them in the form of taxes to prop up profligate spending on the part of the Administration and Congress.
And to say that the Concord Coalition supports “whatever the public wants” for government is like saying a parent supports whatever their teen wants at the Mall. The duty of someone tasked with public responsibility is to be responsible, no matter what the public wants.
Wasn’t the CC position in support of the size government the people are willing to pay for? No new taxes means cutting spending. Want more spending, raise taxes. That’s what I took away from Diane’s comments anyway.
Underwriterguy,
While I obviously don’t speak for them, the Concord Coalition is non-ideological, and thus does not have a position on that question other than that there must be sufficient alignment of revenues and spending, and that we need to be realistic about what solutions are politically feasible (which I infer as meaning that ideological purists — or those posturing as such for political/professional gain — who insist on solving the problem all on the spending side or all on the tax side are obstructing a solution).