Nominee for Budget Director Favors Practical Approach
By JOHN D. MCKINNON
WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama's choice of budget director, Peter Orszag, will have to reconcile his boss's ambitious agenda with a badly strained federal budget.
"In these challenging times, when we are facing both rising deficits and a sinking economy, budget reform is not an option. It is an imperative," Mr. Obama said Tuesday.
Mr. Orszag, currently the director of the Congressional Budget Office, is an economist with a fondness for cowboy boots and common-sense solutions. He received degrees from Princeton University and the London School of Economics and served as an economic policy adviser in the Clinton administration.
But I like the cowboy boot thing -- a little "W" culture may yet persevere...
Click here for the remainder of the profile at the Wall Street Journal.
Maybe the new movie will be Whitehouse Party. Have a great Thaksgiving (perhaps the last we will see for some time as a capitalist society).
ReplyDeleteRight. We had "budget reform" under Bill Clinton. That amounted to gutting CIA of all human intelligence because of the "dirty hands rule" and instead implementing NSA-NRO satellites to do the job. Great job, Bill! What did that get us? 9-11 and a bloated budget at NASA. Then he gutted the DOD. What did he do with all that extra money? He paid his lobbyists to go and repeal Glass Steagall and deregulate the mortgage banking business, the investment banking world and create the internet-dot.com fraud schemes. We are now living the wonderful world of Willy Wonka budget reform, thanks to Bill Clinton.
ReplyDeleteWho helped Bill do it? Schumer, Dodd, Barney Frank and Robert Rubin. ALL OF WHOM OPPOSED putting a leash on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And all of whom are now advising Obama on his financial crisis. Great!