Hillary has more than 200 economic advisors. Why doesn't Warren?

[joshcryer]

146. I don't think it's that black and white.

What cuts has Summers advocated? He was for the payroll tax cut, for obvious reasons, during a time when the country was in turmoil. But that was a temporary position. It continues to be parroted by the right wing today, because they know that if they get the left to resent the policy people in the middle / left then they can cause division.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/06/06/fox-still-pretending-that-former-obama-adviser/184728

Summers actually argued against austerity: http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/hell-freezes-over-larry-summers-gets-it-right

And the US didn't implement anything like EU's drastic austerity that has led to the rise of the right in the EU.

I'm not saying Summers is right or has done everything perfect, I think that, like the policy wonks I discussed in my last post, he's done everything that he felt he could do correctly. He probably got it wrong (advocating against the $1 trillion stimulus).

You are probably not in the South. In Florida, religious schools have pounced on this to slash our already low public school funds. The same is true throughout the South.

And that is probably true and it should be rectified. But they make up 5% of total schools, and if in the South they're more prevalent, then it is likely due to pressure from constituents as opposed to some Democratic mechanization to destroy public schools. School vouchers are still an election issue, unfortunately, it's one of those weird things where it sounds appealing ("give me a choice where to send my kid&quot but in the end it isn't all that good.

But how do you rectify it if you bash Democrats for it and not poor public policy? The Democrats, by and large, advocate science based reasoning and data gathering.

He picked Clinton aides for his cabinet, and chose Clinton centrism and bipartisanship, not realizing that the left was already weary of that, and the right would never ever accept him if he were to move far to the right of Grover Norquist.

Anyone could've seen that coming, though, he didn't have any remotely reasonable connections to get things done. The Clinton's and their previous administration, all the policy wonks were still working in government. Because he ran as a bipartisan it made sense for him, personally, to pick up all the holdovers and bureaucrats that worked under Clinton. Elizabeth Warren actually comes to mind, in that event. She was put in charge of oversight of TARP, not because she was an academic that was involved in finance, but because the Clinton's knew her and appreciated her efforts on bankruptcy reform, and she was an obvious "recommendation."

It probably went something like this:

Obama: TARP is insane, giving all this money away to the bankers, but we gotta do something to keep the economy from bleeding to death, and I'll be damned if we do EU style austerity.

Clinton advisers: Let's just buy everything out and then have them repay it once things settle down, this is all a facade anyway, it's a numbers game, the money still exists, it's just accounting.

Obama: But how do we make sure that they don't run away with the money?

Clinton advisers: There's this lady called Elizabeth Warren and she had experience with bankruptcy reform, she knows how to keep it from falling apart, and she can oversee the receipts.

Obama: Call her up.

I haven't read Axelrod's book so I can't say for sure that's how it went down, but he was favorable to TARP, and thought that Obama should've been given more credit for it than he did. Was TARP great? No, read Warren's report. Was it necessary? Either that or massive austerity. TARP should've excluded CEOs from getting bonuses (which would've led to a lawsuit, no doubt), and it should've broken up the banks. We didn't get it. It sucks. But everyone did what they could do, and Warren was central to that, but why bash everyone just doing their policy work?

I think that's precisely why the Republicans keep winning midterms, they spend the whole time bashing what the government is doing, and then makes them seem like failures, and that it's necessary to replace them with people who literally don't want the government to function. (Every shutdown has been because of Republicans, not Democrats.)