Austan Goolsbee reminds people that the Inspector General's report on his possible abuse of IRS was never released

The Weekly Standard provides a review here:

In August 2010, Austan Goolsbee, serving at the time as economic adviser to President Obama, told reporters during an anonymous background briefing that Koch Industries doesn't pay corporate income taxes. That statement was made at the same time that top Democrats, including President Obama himself, were demonizing Charles and David Koch, the owners of Koch Industries, for giving money to Tea Party groups. Goolsbee's remark led to a federal investigation, the results of which have never been released. . . .

Now Goolsbee makes a bizarre tweet here:

Without the inspector general's report, we don't know where the White House came up with the claim that Koch Industries doesn't pay corporate income taxes. But earlier this month, Austan Goolsbee offered a new explanation in light of the unfolding IRS scandal. Goolsbee wrote on Twitter:

@joerepublic1 there was no secret info on koch bros. It came fr/heresptimes.com/2003/12/28/Sta… but was a mistake--one of the other Koch bros.
— Austan Goolsbee (@Austan_Goolsbee) May 14, 2013

But then Goolsbee tried to delete the tweet.  Read more here.

Obama's past IRS abuses can't be blamed on "low level workers," Austan Goolsbee and the Koch Brothers

This isn't the first time that President Obama's administration has abused the IRS's powers.  Austan Goolsbee who was Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors told reporters the amount of money that the Koch brothers had paid in taxes in 2010.  Note that this, like the abuses against the Tea Party, also occurred in 2010 and that it involved people that that administration hated as much as the Tea Party.  The current ruckus isn't the first time that Obama administration abuses of the IRS have been compared to the Nixon administration.

President Obama claims that he has "no patience" for the "outrageous" IRS mess, but if true, why didn't he do anything or even comment about Goolsbee's actions?

This is part of the discussion from my book Debacle (references in book):

[Austan] Goolsbee also learned how to punish the president’s political adversaries. The battle between the Koch bothers and President Obama hasn’t gotten as much coverage as that between George Soros and Republicans, but it is about as bitter. A New Yorker headline gives one side of the “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”71 Goolsbee entered the fray at an August 27, 2010, press briefing where he let slip that he knew that Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar energy business run by the libertarian Koch brothers, had paid no income taxes. “[W]e have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax, some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries is a multibillion-dollar business,” Mr. Goolsbee told reporters during an on-the- record background briefing on corporate taxes. 

Koch Industries is a privately held company and therefore their tax returns and tax payments are not normally publicly available. This recalls shades of Richard Nixon’s abuse of the Internal Revenue Service to collect information on his enemies, and there were serious questions of how Mr. Goolsbee obtained this information. At first, the White House sent Politico an email explaining that the information was publicly available and referenced testimony to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Koch’s own website.72 But they were just dead wrong. How much taxes Koch Industries pays appears in neither place. 

The Obama administration then switched to a second line of defense: that Mr. Goolsbee simply misspoke, that he didn’t mean to say what he said, and that it was merely a coincidence that he had just happened to guess their tax information.73 But it was quite a lucky guess. The IRS’s Inspector General promised to look into whether Goolsbee had illegally gotten confidential tax information,74 but a report was never released, and with Democrats in control of both the Senate and House at the time, there was no congressional pressure on the Obama administration to release the report.75  . . .

UPDATE: There is no public record of whether you are an S corp.  There is a public record if they are an LLC, but they can be set in various forms and that won't be public record.  They could also be a C corp and that wouldn't be public information.  Thus for Goolsbee to even know that they are an S corp or what version of being an LLC would be problematic.  Specifically on the point The Koch's lawyer had this point:

"contrary to the administration official's statement on what sources were used by the administration, neither the Koch website nor Forbes' list of private companies has information regarding Koch's tax filing status.  This is confidential information.  Given these facts, one must wonder why the White House is anonymously commenting on the confidential tax status of Koch Industries."

UPDATE: Here is another example of abuse.

”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.” . . .  

UPDATE: Fox News has this updated discussion on Goolsbee.  If the last paragraph in the quote below, it sounds as if many people in the Obama administration were in on this leak of IRS info.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney took some heat Tuesday after he told reporters that nobody in the Obama administration had targeted conservative groups in the past.  

Many questioned the statement and pointed to a 2010 incident involving Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Goolsbee told reporters on Aug. 27, 2010 that Koch Industries, a billion-dollar energy company run by the politically influential Koch brothers, paid no income taxes. 

The tax records of Koch Industries -- a private company – would not have been public information and therefore should not have been known to Goolsbee. At the time, the Obama team backpedaled and said the information was made public in two places – which turned out to be untrue. Then the Obama administration said Goolsbee had misspoken and that he had guessed the company’s confidential tax information. 

At the time, the IRS had promised to look into the Goolsbee gaffe but a report was never publicly released. 

A source familiar with the situation suggested to FoxNews.com Tuesday that Goolsbee’s comments were a “calculated” attempt by the administration to insert Koch’s name into his discussion about companies that don’t pay taxes. . . .

Rush Limbaugh had this extended discussion where a caller (me) brought up the Goolsbee example.

RUSH: To the phones. People been waiting patiently as always. Up first, John in Philadelphia. Hello, sir. Thank you for the call.
CALLER: Oh. Thank you very much. You know, I think this is a very important issue. This isn't the first time that the Obama administration has abused the IRS' powers. In 2010, at the same time they were going after the Tea Party, Austan Goolsbee -- the chairman of the president's council of economic advisers -- was using the IRS to go after the Koch brothers, probably somebody that they hated as much as the Tea Party. There was a press briefing where Goolsbee told the press how much money the Koch brothers have been paying in taxes. You know, at first they said that the information was "publicly available," and when that turned out not to be the case, the administration said, "Well, you know, he simply accidentally guessed the exact amount that they pay."
RUSH: You know, that's exactly right. I'd forgotten that, but you're exactly right. Austan Goolsbee did tell the press how little the Koch brothers were paying in taxes -- in his perspective, how little -- and there was no way he coulda known that.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Unless somebody at the IRS had shared the data with him.
CALLER: Right. This is cover-up by the Obama administration. The inspector general for the IRS was supposed to release a report on Goolsbee, and after the furor died down they kept on delaying it.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Eventually they just never released the report on Goolsbee. So this is one thing. If you want to go and show that this is a pattern -- you know, and Goolsbee's not just some low-level staff person. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. And the Obama administration should finally be forced to release the inspector general report on what Goolsbee knew and how he released that information.
RUSH: Well, technically it's not how he released it; how he got it. There's only one way he could know it, and that is if he was able to pick up the phone, call the IRS, and say, "Give me the numbers on the tax return for the Koch brothers and for Koch Industries," and if the IRS gave him the information, bammo! Major, major violation. And, you're right. They've tried to let the passage of time cause everybody to forget about it, because there have been events take place in subsequent days which have taken precedence.
Those events have caused everybody to forget about it. You didn't. You're exactly right.  . . . 

Austan Goolsbee continues to make outrageous claims

Goolsbee's halting discussion here seems consistent with even him being uncomfortable with the claims that he is making.

Austan Goolsbee: Well, the milestone of the government debt has virtually nothing to do with the reasons that the deficits have been large in the last two years.  The long run fiscal challenge facing the country, as you have highlighted many times, are associated with the aging of the population, the rise of health care costs, and the choices that we have made about tax rates. . . . 

The fact that the Congressional Budget Office is saying that the deficit is going to be record breaking before Obama has ever gotten into office is, I think, a little indicative of what the true reasoning of the increase in the deficit is.  Which is that we had the worst economic downturn of our lifetimes. . . . 

And there the Romney Plan that they have outlined would make that substantially worse is $3 to $5 trillion in tax cuts that you try to pay for in addition to whatever deficit reduction that you try to have . . . 

Neil Cavoto: They do spur growth . . . 

Austan Goolsbee: Depending on what rates they are they can spur some growth. . . .

Ironically, just a few days ago the message from the Obama administration was that we can't cut the deficit now because of the Keynesian arguments that doing so would hurt the recovery.

1) The aging population can't explain the deficit over the last two years.  In 2008, Social Security and Medicare as a percentage of total Federal government spending was 33.8% (see Table B-81).  In 2012, it is supposed to be 33.2%.  Thus they haven't even gone up as fast as the rest of government spending.

2) Similarly if you add together Medicare and the categories of spending designated at "Health," their share of Federal spending is again flat: 22.5% in 2008 to 22.3% in 2012 (see Table B-81), and that is despite Obama expanding health care even outside of Obamacare with the $33 billion State Children's Health Insurance Program.  Obamacare appears to have not only increased the costs of insurance (see also here), but it has also greatly increased government spending (hardly controlling spending as Goolsbee claims that he is concerned with doing).

3) Government spending as a share of GDP soared under Obama.  See a discussion here.  Note that the last year that Republicans controlled both the presidency and the congress the 2007 budget deficit was $160.7 billion (see Table B-78).  This discussion is also relevant for the second paragraph.  I have previously written up a response to the CBO point and I will link to it here when I find it.

The rest of Goolsbee's discussion here is quite misleading.  His attacks on the Republicans not making an agreement ignores the fact the tax increases are to go into effect now, but the spending cuts are delayed for years.  There is no way to bind future congresses to ensure that those spending cuts will be made.  In addition, American's taxes are already extremely high compared with other countries.

Austan Goolsbee: 'We're definitely better off'

Rep. Paul Ryan versus Goolsbee

For an academic, Goolsbee has a bad habit of either just following Democratic talking points or just making things up.  Points that I know he is sufficiently smart enough not to believe.  In the transcript below he has no problem attacking Romney for a company going under after Romney had left Bain,  and fails to acknowledge the inaccuracy of his attacks.  Ryan's comment was about the large portion of government money going to Obama supporters, not that all of it did.  Goolsbee's reference to a single McCain supporter is completely irrelevant.  The hope that "the Obama philosophy [is] to try to transform the government into only picking winners" is something that I can't believe Goolsbee believes.  How does it address the question of what is actually happening?  Why does Goolsbee believe that the government will have a higher success rate than private individuals investing their own money?  Even Wallace finds it necessary to bring Goolsbee back on track.  The transcript from Fox News Sunday is available here:

WALLACE: But let me just ask you, sir, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital did, and what lots of money, millions of dollars into this steel industry, the time when the steel was in trouble, what's wrong with that? 

GOOLSBEE: Well, it depends on how they did it. And as I say, they ought to turn over the annual records of the company.If you want to establish they did not have kind of a leverage buy out mentality of pulling the resources out of the company -- turn over the records and let the people see what the business record was. Don't just pick two or three companies that are the success stories and say look at these because that invites the ones that went wrong.In this case, the company did horribly but the investors did great. So, I think it's a little bit different than a normal investor philosophy which if we can turn the company around in a positive way, we benefit. This was the case where they canceled the pension, they drove the company into the ground but the investors from Bain actually profited a great deal. 

WALLACE: Let me follow up with Congressman Paul Ryan.Because the Obama campaign says the point of Romney economics is to make money for Bain, to make money for their investors, even if all of the workers get wiped out. And in this particular case, with the steel mill in Kansas City, the workers and that plant went bankrupt. The 750 workers were laid off and Bain did make millions of dollars in profits. 

RYAN: You know what's ironic about this, Chris, Mitt Romney was running the Olympics during this time. He wasn't even running Bain during the time period in question.I think the individual if I'm not mistaken who was running Bain is a big Obama contributor.But for the point, Chris, what Bain did was they used private capital to help struggling businesses. What President Obama is doing is he's gambling with taxpayer money and giving money to corporate contributors, to campaign contributors like Solyndra and he's losing taxpayer money.So, what we have in the Obama administration is this crony capitalism, this corporate welfare where President Obama thinks it's right that we taxpayer dollars to give to private companies and take bets on these private companies. That's wrong.What is right is a private sector that you have risked that capital. You put capital in businesses whether they're struggling or not to try and grow those businesses, some succeed, some don't. On the net, when on Mitt Romney ran Bain, they were very successful. They created thousands of jobs, great success stories.But for the point, we don't think that the government should be in the position of picking winners or losers in the economy which is the result of the president's economics.  

WALLACE: Let me -- 

RYAN: The result of it is, we have stagnation. 

WALLACE: Let me let Mr. Goolsbee into that.I mean, what about the argument that, you know, it's the private sector. If companies want to take a chance, they take a chance. But the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers. 

GOOLSBEE: Well, that's two different arguments. The first one I actually think is a little bit cheeky because in several of these bankruptcy cases, you saw the investors profit by dumping the pension on to the government and actually getting bailouts from the government, which helped to cover the profits that were going to the investors.On the picking of winners, it is absolutely not the Obama philosophy to try to transform the government into only picking winners. By that I think Congressman Ryan is referring to things like in the midst of the crisis deciding to save General Motors and the auto industry. 

WALLACE: I think wait a minute. Without speaking for him, I think he's talking about things like Solyndra. . . .

New National Review piece: Goolsbee’s Gaffes

My piece at National Review Online starts this way:

The Obama administration is having a difficult time explaining the unemployment rate, which has been above 9 percent for 27 consecutive months and is today 1.3 percentage points higher than it was when Obama took office. The October numbers, due to be released on Friday, are unlikely to look any better. So, his administration goes to great lengths to spin its own unique set of facts.

Just look at Austan Goolsbee’s Friday interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Despite having stepped down as Obama’s chief economic advisor in August, Goolsbee continues to do media shows supporting Obama’s economic policies. Goolsbee declared: “I deal only in facts, Sean.” Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims.

Hannity: We heard that unemployment wasn’t going to go above 8 percent.

Goolsbee: When they made that 8 percent prediction, that was the same prediction being made by everyone. But you forget the other half of the thing, which is if you did nothing, the rate would go to 8.9 percent, and it was already above that before the first part of the stimulus even went out.

Mr. Goolsbee is just plain wrong. When the Obama administration got into office, they made optimistic promises about their stimulus program, claiming that during 2009, unemployment would stop rising and then fall. The unemployment rate in January was 7.8 percent. In late February, the administration claimed that it would average just 8.1 percent for the year if the Stimulus was enacted. . . .

Alan Krueger, Obama's nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers

Austan Goolsbee did his dissertation trying to show that higher tax rates didn't reduce how hard people worked. Obama's new nominee for that position, Alan Krueger, has a very similar set of beliefs. Krueger argued for example that higher minimum wages do not impact how many jobs are available for low wage workers. This guy fits Obama's view of the world and economics very well. From The Hill newspaper:

With the economy in dire straits in January 2009, Krueger, a Princeton economics professor, wrote that a consumption tax would be one possible tool to keep longer-term deficits in check as the government worked to stimulate the economy.

Krueger also stressed that he was not sure whether consumption taxes were the best way to proceed, only that the idea was worth considering. But he added that a 5 percent national sales tax could create an extra $500 billion per year in revenue “and fill a considerable hole in the budget outlook.”

“The prospect of greater revenue flowing into federal coffers would probably help lower long-term interest rates because the government would need to borrow less down the road, and further bolster the economy,” Krueger wrote on The New York Times website. . . .

Obama won't take responsibility for economy

Here is part of an interview that Sean Hannity had with Austan Goolsbee. Personally, I think that this interview was quite telling. In response to Obama's broken promises, Goolsbee blames the bad economy and the high unemployment rate this year on the high price of oil, but when Sean brings up that there was high oil prices during the last year of the Bush administration, Goolsbee wants to have it both ways. Obviously he wants to say that high oil prices caused problems back then, but that has clearly not been what Obama has blamed for the problems in 2008.

Of course back in 2008, Obama blamed the high prices on oil speculators and promised a crack down to reduce prices if he were president. Of course, putting speculators in jail would make things worse, not better, but why isn't Obama doing what he promised here?

Corzine said Obama's plan aims to close the so-called Enron loophole, which exempts some energy speculators who trade electronically from U.S. regulation. It takes its name from the now-collapsed energy firm that benefited from the law. . . .

The loophole is "one example of the special interest politics that put the interests of Big Oil and speculators ahead of the interests of working people," Obama's campaign said in a statement. . . .

As the claims about earthquakes hurting the economy, I thought that all these Keynesians had been arguing that wars and other disasters helped. Remember Krugman's claim:

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. . . .

Other Democrats point to Hurricanes as a way to create jobs:

Gov. Beverly Perdue (D-NC): "obviously there will be some employment as people rebuild and prepare. This morning they said there's at least 27,000 or 28,000 structures that have an opportunity to be hit by the storm. So, we'll know by Saturday or Sunday. But all of us want jobs, but this isn't a way to get them quite frankly."

Goolsbee's interview with Hannity:

Hannity: What went wrong?

Goolsbee: Respectfully, Sean you are mixing up the time frame there. In the year 2010 which is when most of the clips when the president was saying we were going to grow again. We were growing and over that 17 months we added two-and-a-half million jobs.

Now, at the beginning of this year we get earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, European financial crises, now they even have earthquakes out of Washington, D.C. I mean, we've had a series of things that have put some heavy blows and slowed the economy back down again. But, I think it's a little -- I don't think you want to confuse something that is way down and starting to grow out.

Hannity: . . . He said that he was going to create millions of jobs. He said that he would cut the deficit in half. He said the unemployment rate would stay below 8 percent. Those were promises that he made as a candidate, none of which have actually come true. Are you actually going to make the case that the Arab Spring and the Japanese earthquake had a more significant economic impact than say 9/11 on the economy or Katrina on the economy?

Goolsbee: With the price of gas shooting up to four dollars a gallon affected everybody out and I was just very direct way.

Hannity: It happened in the Bush years . . .

Goolsbee: It happened at the end of the Bush years and then preceded the worst financial crisis in all of our lifetimes, so I don't know if that's necessarily the perfect example.

Hannity: Oh, Alright . . .

Goolsbee: We face a downturn where we lose a significant number of jobs 7, 8 pushing up to 9 million in the downturn. But let's not get into a thing where a guy takes your TV up to the balcony drops it off and says that the last I saw the looks fine. When the president takes office we're in the midst of what is now recognized as the worst downturn since we have had data in the 1940s.

Can anyone make sense of Goolsbee's statements here?

So Goolsbee says that he agrees that "If the market wants to produce clean energy, it'll produce clean energy," but he acknowledges this despite supporting massive subsidies to get the companies to produce products that they wouldn't produce without the subsidies. From an interview with Larry Kudlow.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: . . . Now it seems like you're making fun of some of the alternative energy stuff, but if you look at China, if you look at Europe and if you look at a lot of the faster growing regions of the world, they're heavily investing in it.

KUDLOW: It's been a dismal failure in Europe.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: (Unintelligible)...alternative energy.

KUDLOW: It's been a dismal failure in Spain. It's been a dismal failure in Europe. I say, Austan, if the market...

Mr. GOOLSBEE: It seems like in China and Brazil it's been quite a success.

KUDLOW: If the market wants to produce clean energy, it'll produce clean energy. Natural gas from shale is clean energy.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: Look, I agree with that.

KUDLOW: I just don't see why we don't...

Mr. GOOLSBEE: I agree with that.

KUDLOW: ...call the EPA dogs off. That's one of these regulatory issues. Call the National Labor Relation dogs off of Boeing, Austan. In other words, some of this stuff, there's very little presidents can do. I get that.

Mr. GOOLSBEE: OK. [I don't think that Goolsbee is conceding anything with this last OK.]

Goolsbee on jobs: 'One month is not a trend'

The "one month is not a trend" claim from Austan Goolsbee has gotten a little old. Unemployment has gone up for three straight months and there is a good chance that it will go up again tomorrow. If it does go up for four straight months, can we call that a trend?

March 8.8%
April 9.0%
May 9.1%
June 9.2%
July ???%

Newest Fox News piece: Seven Myths About the Looming Debt-Ceiling 'Disaster'

My newest piece starts this way:

If Congress and the president don't raise the debt ceiling, the consequences will be disastrous, politicians and pundits tell us, -- the equivalent of an economic Armageddon. And President Obama warns that the consequences are so dire that he cannot possibly tolerate any delay in making an agreement. He announced yesterday that any debt deal must be completed by today, July 15th.

According to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, failure to raise the debt ceiling limit will cause the United States to default and "cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.”
On Thursday, he renewed these warnings. And President Obama alarmed retired Americans this week: "I cannot guarantee that those [Social Security] checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

But the list of terrible things to come, if the government is stopped from continued deficit spending, goes on. Failure to raise the ceiling, it is warned, will dramatically raise mortgage interest rates, cause housing sales to plunge, create panic on world financial markets, and destroy the value of the dollar.

Austan Goolsbee, Obama's head of his Counsel of Economic Advisers, went so far this week as to blame the continued slow economic recovery on those few politicians who are against raising the debt ceiling. "[I]t's important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don't know that the government -- there are people actively advocating that the government declare it's not going to pay its bills," he told MSNBC. Yet, the slow recovery has been going on for over two years, well before Republicans obtained control of the House of Representatives.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that Americans oppose increasing the debt ceiling, by a 69 to 24 percent margin.
Mr. Obama dismissed this finding recently and, as usual, he believes he knows better. According to him, Americans just don't understand the complexities of the arguments: "Let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury (bond) auction goes. They shouldn't. . . . They've got a lot of other things on their plate. We're paid to worry about it. . . . Now, I will say that some of the professional politicians know better. And for them to say that we shouldn't be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. They know better."

But the general public is right. There is an overload from all the doomsday predictions. Earlier this year, before the debt limit was hit on May 21, the Obama administration already used the same scare tactics.

Here's a look at seven myths that the Obama administration is pushing on the American people: . . .

Obama at his press conference today was asked what he was willing to cut in spending (at 11:27 into the video): "You know, I am not going to get into specifics." At 13:20, "But if you are trying to get to 2.4 trillion without any revenue then you are effectively gutting a whole bunch of discretion domestic spending that is going to be too burdensome, that is not something that I am going to support." Note that this is $2.4 trillion out of $46 trillion.

Fox News has an online poll asking people whether the threat of default is a "Scare Tactic." The poll is available here. This discussion by Rove is interesting:



Note: I have been asked about the 14th Amendment claim. For those who need more than the link in the piece, the Supreme Court decision in Perry v. United States (1935) ruled that any legally incurred debt must be paid.

The Fourteenth Amendment, in its fourth section, explicitly declares: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned." While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War, its language indicates a broader connotation. We regard it as confirmatory of a fundamental principle which applies as well to the government bonds in question, and to others duly authorized by the Congress, as to those issued before the Amendment was adopted. Nor can we perceive any reason for not considering the expression "the validity of the public debt" as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations. . . .

Obama administration is concerned about uncertainty, but only one type of uncertainty

What about all the regulatory uncertainty? Doesn't that count? The administration is so selective in its arguments. Austan Goolsbee doesn't seem to have a problem with these types of arguments.

"I do think it's important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don't know that the government -- there are people actively advocating that the government declare it's not going to pay its bills," White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, on MSNBC. . . .

Apparently, the "web blanket" statement is becoming quite the catch phrase with the administration.

Goolsbee claims that deficit "not materially worse" under Obama

What can one say about this? Even after the bailout passed in late 2008, Obama was accurately saying that the deficit was up to about $455 billion. What is it now? $1.65 trillion? Goolsbee must have a strange definition of "materially."

The moderator, Bob Schieffer, of the third debate put it this way: "We found out yesterday that this year's deficit will reach an astounding record high $455 billion."

Obama doesn't talk about new jobs numbers, gets some boos from union workers

Two years into the recovery and the unemployment rate has risen for the second straight month and is stuck above 9 percent.

President Obama didn't mention Friday's weak jobs report in his speech at a Chrysler plant in Ohio, instead choosing to talk about the recovery of the auto industry.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters on the flight to Toledo that Obama "will talk about the jobs numbers."

But one of the only allusions Obama made to the bleak report was when he said that "we're going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a hard time with." (The Chrysler workers, who make the Wrangler at that plant, responded by booing and heckling him.) . . .

See also here.

As Goolsbee sees it:

Austan Goolsbee, President Barack Obama’s chief economist, said today’s jobs report represents a “little bump” in the road to recovery and that the broader trends are “substantially more positive” than when Obama took office.
“We should never read too much into any one month’s report,” Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “No doubt we face some headwinds and hit a little bump in the road.”
Manufacturing has continued to grow and there still is more to be done to drive the unemployment rate down, he said.
Employers added 54,000 jobs in May, the smallest increase in eight months, the Labor Department reported in Washington. The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percent to 9.1 percent. . . .

When has he previously cautioned not to read much into one month's data?

Obama's Panel on Small Businesses filled with CEOs of large business and unions

Gooslbee seems to always be willing to say anything for this administration.

. . . Hours after the White House released a list of members appointed to the panel, Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was asked to explain why most of Obama’s appointments to the 22-member board are executives at big companies.

Goolsbee began his response by instead mentioning the names of Obama’s newest nominees to the CEA. “Carl Shapiro himself started a small business that he grew and sold to a larger business,” Goolsbee said of the deputy assistant attorney general nominated by Obama on Wednesday.

He then cited the January nomination of Katharine Abraham, reminding reporters that back “in the ’90s,” she had worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I think they have good knowledge about small business,” he said of Shapiro and Abraham.

Finally, on the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness: “Many of those names are CEOs of larger companies, but there are several small business members of that council,” Goolsbee said, not naming anyone specific. (There is one: Darlene Miller.)

The list of members also includes “union labors,” “academics” and “people representing many different industries,” he added. . . .

The Federal Government Destroys the Return to Pharmaceutical developing new drugs and now the government wants to develop new drugs

Big surprise. The continuing threat of price controls has destroyed the incentives to invest in new research. So now the socialist Obama is having the government take over the Pharmaceutical company's role of developing new drugs. Not "intended to be competitive with private" firms? Be serious. Where "private industry has failed"? Here is the bottom line: Can government create as many new drugs for the same amount of money as private companies? If they can, that will be the first for the government. If not, rather than forcing the companies to charge low prices so that the government can "save money" and then have the government have to pay to get the research done. Why not just let the private companies keep their money and let them do the research?

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drug makers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson’s that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

The initial financing of the government’s new drug center is relatively small compared with the $45.8 billion that the industry estimates it invested in research in 2009. The cost of bringing a single drug to market can exceed $1 billion, according to some estimates, and drug companies have typically spent twice as much on marketing as on research, a business model that is increasingly suspect. . . .

“None of this is intended to be competitive with the private sector,” Dr. Collins said. . . .

Whether the government can succeed where private industry has failed . . .

UPDATE: "“Startup America,” the administration's new campaign designed to put the focus on jobs and inspiring Americans to think like entrepreneurs." Is this ironic?

As much of Washington kept its gaze on protests in Egpyt on Monday, President Obama's Cabinet sought to turn attention to “Startup America,” the administration's new campaign designed to put the focus on jobs and inspiring Americans to think like entrepreneurs.

“It’s quite clear that some of the biggest employers in the nation ... started in somebody’s garage as just an idea that they had,” economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said at the White House along with Cabinet secretaries and other members of the administration. “And whether you look at innovation itself and new ideas, if you look at employment, if you look at the growth that gives people careers – all of those things are tied to entrepreneurial ventures in a quite ... direct way.”

Gene Sperling, Obama's new director of the National Economic Council, said a bill for small businesses signed by Obama was “just the start,” calling the new policy measures a “top priority” for the president.

Austan Goolsbee has some explaining to do

Back on August 27th, Austan Goolsbee made this statement during an on-the-record background briefing on corporate taxes:

So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar businesses. . . .

The White House claims that this is publicly available information, but they can't point to where in the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board report that the information is available.

Mark Holden of Koch tells TWS that the White House's response leaves a number of questions unanswered. "My primary concern is, Why does our name keep coming up, why do they single us out?" says Holden. "They don’t respond to that. That leads me to believe that it is part of a campaign against us because of our political views."

The White House official's claim that "No senior administration officials have any access to anyone's tax returns" is less than an absolute denial of wrongdoing. Is it possible that a junior administration official had access to Koch's tax information and relayed it to a senior administration official? We don't know for sure. White House press officials still refuse to respond to requests for comment from THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Holden also expresses doubt that the administration official based his claim merely on publicly available information. "The White House’s statement doesn’t cite anything particular or specific" on Koch's tax status in the PERAB report. "And what we’ve seen in the publicly available documents thus far, we have not seen anything referring to us and our corporate tax payment issues.... Even if [experts who testified to PERAB] did address that issue, it wouldn’t make that information publicly available necessarily."

Politico has an email from the WH pointing to "testimony before the the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) and from Koch's own website," but neither source pans out.

So it is publicly available information, but the White House can't point to exactly where this data was available. Now today the WH says that Goolsbee "misspoke," but it seems like a bit of stretch to explain that he just happened to accidentally guess how much taxes Koch Industries had actually paid. I have asked the WH about both of these points, but I have received no response back.

This isn't the first time that Goolsbee has done the political dirty work for Obama (see also here).

Now an investigation is going to take place:

Obama’s press office wouldn’t say which of the PERAB’s witnesses made the claim — or why he would alert reporters to a potentially embarrassing detail about a company run by Obama’s political rivals.

In a letter released Wednesday and first obtained by the Weekly Standard, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George informed Grassley he had “ordered the commencement of a review into the matters alleged.”

Obama and the Democrats have long disliked the political activities of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

In an August 9 speech, President Obama singled out Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political group founded by David Koch in 2004. In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Obama said:

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don't know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don't know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

Unfortunately, Mr. Goolsbee's actions aren't the only ones involving the IRS in politics. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) wants to use the IRS to investigate whether Crossroads GPS (Karl Rove's group) and Americans for Job Security are violating any tax rules. Dana Perino reports at Fox News that one of the big unions were called and told not to worry they weren't going to be one of the organizations investigated.

Obama as anti-free market, is there even a question?

Is Obama anti-business? Last week Obama defended himself against these claims. Now Austan Goolsbee explains that Obama isn't anti-business because (video available at link):

“There have been people criticizing the president, saying he’s a socialist, he doesn’t believe in the private market — that’s totally bogus." . . . “From the beginning and continuing up to the present, the president has always said that the private sector is going to be the only sustainable source of job creation and growth in this country, and that’s what we need to have.” . . . .

Ugh? What does the fact that the president says that most jobs will have to be working for private firms have to do with proving that he isn't anti-business. He wants to use government grants to business to determine what businesses will grow. That is pro-market?

Goolsbee blames the angry sentiments on: “When the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, and when you’re coming out of the deepest hole in anybody’s lifetime, you knew that there were going to be a lot of people generally upset and not feeling good about where they are. ..." Obama is surely anti-free market. He dislikes businesses, though he is happy to give wealth transfers to some of them.

Goolsbee also did an interview that just came out with the WSJ. He claims that Obama isn't anti-business because he "pushed through 16 tax cuts to assist small businesses and proposed additional incentives." The problem is that Obama doesn't trust businesses to make decisions. See also here.

Obama and Goolsbee keep claiming that this is the worst recession since the Great Depression, though Goolsbee claims that this is "the deepest recession since 1929."

Obama's anti-business attitudes don't just stem from his support for various price controls on everything from credit markets to health insurance. It isn't just that he is constantly attacking corporate officers for their excessive pay. He attacks insurance companies for being excessively concentrated and he lies about how concentrated they are.

Strong arming bondholders to get them to agree to forfeit their investments. Obama denounced Chrysler creditors as "speculators" who refuse to sacrifice as they should. Forcing the removal of auto dealerships that the companies didn't want removed and remove dealerships based on the gender and race of the dealers. After bailing out banks, Obama sought authority to seize any financial institution whose collapse might be "a systemic risk" to the economy. Attacking the profits of insurance companies and blaming those profits for the high cost of their insurance. He attacked doctors who give patients unnecessary tests or medicine as: "And it's driven from a business mentality instead of a mentality of, how do we make patients better?" What about calling Wall Street "fat cats."

His discussions with CEOs involve lecturing them: "He has held a number of meetings with CEOs, formally and off the record, but attendees I’ve talked to feel that although he listens intently, he rarely changes course."

Possibly Obama may go as far as claiming that the health care bill was done for businesses because he wanted to lower their costs.

Dinesh D'Souza is wrong when he says that Obama "isn't exactly a socialist." If he isn't socialist, he is fascist. Where private ownership is allowed, there is complete government control.

New piece at Fox News: Austan Goolsbee -- Spinning Like a Top

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

With President Obama's poor record on the economy, it isn't too surprising that he would want Mr. Austan Goolsbee to put a positive spin on the current economic conditions. Mr. Goolsbee, whose academic work was known for supposedly showing that increased tax rates didn't affect how hard people worked, has now been appointed as the head of the president's Council of Economic Advisors. But Goolsbee has become quite practiced for his ability to "spin" the news, not for his accuracy.

We got a taste of his talents when he made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows rounds yesterday. On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Goolsbee . . .

"Former Car Czar Rattner Rats on Obama"

For those who believed politics was involved in the decisions in the car industry, it appears that Mr. Rattner's new book will provide a lot of information. So much for Obama's promise not to let politics interfere with how the companies were run. Bold added by me to the discussion below.

-When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: "Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer..."

-Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.

-"[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup."

-"If his team had linked arms with the outgoing administration, as President Bush's advisers had proposed, billions of dollars could well have been saved."

-Rattner says Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual dictated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's schedule, public appearances and staff selections.

-He says Obama economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair as enemies who slowed down decision making with infighting

-Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: "Why can't they make a Corolla?" he has Obama asking.