Top White House economist Goolsbee to Resign

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top White House economist Austan Goolsbee said on Monday he was stepping down, marking the exit of one of President Barack Obama’s top aides at a time when new signs of weakness have emerged in the economy.

Less than a year after he was named chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Goolsbee plans to return to his teaching job at the University of Chicago, the Obama administration said in a statement. He will be back in Chicago in time for the start of the next school year.

Those that can't, teach?

Mr. Goolsbee is the fifth in a long, ignoble line of 'smartest guys in the room' to abandon Obama's floundering ship of state. SG at SL comments on this heart-broken lament from Reuters.

Over here, the lovely and talented Michele Malkin has some deft insight to Obama's Egghead Economic Saboteurs:

"When Goolsbee joined Team Obama, the unemployment rate was at around 6 percent. When he announced his resignation on Monday, the jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent. Romer and Jared Bernstein (former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden) had predicted unemployment would drop every single month after August 2009 due to the Obama stimulus. Bernstein bailed on the administration in April 2011 for the sanctuary of a liberal think-tank. He'll also now ply his failed wares as a financial pundit.

These hapless command-and-control ideologues were preceded by Peter Orszag, who hung his "Mission Accomplished" banner over the White House budget office in June 2010 after fewer than two years on the job, and by former National Economic Council head and hedge fund manager Larry Summers, who was caught sleeping on the job -- literally -- more than once during his brief tenure. Summers packed his bags in September. He was followed by Princeton economics professor and former top Obama Treasury Department official Alan Krueger in October 2010..."

Which all ledes to the theory that just won't go away, Government-Assisted Economic Suicide by Monty Pelerin:

"According to Tenebrarum, no amount of additional stimulus can remedy this problem. It really doesn’t matter, because point 3b, has also been reached — we are out of resources. The Federal Reserve has more than tripled its balance sheet in the last three years. Additionally, the Federal Government has created about $5 Trillion in new debt to fund Keynesian stimuli.

There is nothing to show for squandering all these resources other than an increasingly insolvent government, an increasingly impoverished population and a woefully imbalanced economy. It is time to face up to the fact that eight decades of Keynesian politics has hollowed out the economy, leaving us with massive distortions, imbalances and unserviceable debt. More of the same medicine will only make each of these conditions worse.

The economic adjustments required now rival those of The Great Depression. They cannot be avoided by anything the government can do. Government can only make matters more intractable."

As I alluded earlier, some say this by design. Why? Because a crisis - even one orchestrated - should never go to waste. Hey, if a little trillion dollar command & control worked to balloon an already gargantuan gub'mint after the 2008 melt down, why not a whole lot after a truly catastrophic, systemic failure?

In the central planning, nanny state philosophy, only more big gub'mint control, spending and consolidation could rescue the nation in such turmoil, which would, by default, result in greater power for the gub'mint.

And that, of course, is a central planning, nanny state bureaucrat's wet dream.

CC: Shanin & Parks.