Economist trashes economists

[Ichingcarpenter]

On McCain's conference call today, advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin echoed a line from Hillary Clinton's push to suspend the gas tax:

“You can stack all the economists end to end and still not find common sense," he said.

Holtz-Eakin, it's pointed out to me, ought to know, as he himself is a member of that despited class.

The first three words of his official biography are: "World-class economist."

Worse still: He has a PhD. from Princeton, also known as Krugman U.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/Economist_trashes_economists.html

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. It's called the dismal science ... economists trash economists for sport and profit n/t

[enki23]

2. hey, economists as a class are wide open for "trashing"

what with the fact that the profession appears to be dominated (at least at the top levels) by right-wing ideologues. but in this case, they have a point. this is political posturing, not a serious attempt to fix the problem. if they wanted to do something that was *certain* to have the effect they desire, why couldn't they simply impose a price ceiling for the summer? not politically popular with the conservative crowd, but it would be short lived, right? and it wouldn't effectively short the government of already-allocated and direly-needed revenue. maybe index it to the cost of crude to avoid the worst of any problems you might cause to trickle back up the supply chain?