LaRouche: Peter Orszag is a Moon-Atic

After Budget Director Peter Orszag announced an Obama White House FY2011 budget barren of real economic investment, but full of the "green" kind, economist Lyndon LaRouche called Orszag "a moon-atic." Shutting down NASA manned space exploration — after 50 years of this nation's most important transportation program — was just the worst of a terrible concoction. "Orszag and the other Obama moon-atics say that America should produce nothing but gambling debts," LaRouche said. "That's the only kind of employment they allow. You can be employed — just don't produce anything."

Orszag and Council of Economic Advisers head Christina Romer presented Obama's budget at the White House this morning. Despite projecting to increase taxes by over $600 billion in the coming fiscal year, Obama proposes that Congress invest essentially nothing in hard infrastructure — space, transportation, nuclear power, rail corridors, water transport, clean water provision, etc. His "jobs program" — $100 billion out of a $3.8 trillion budget — consists of small business tax cuts and state aid for unemployment benefits, etc. The much-ballyhooed high-speed rail investment of FY2010 is followed for FY2011 by a proposal for — $1 billion.

Here's what moon-atic Orszag said he and Obama thought they could afford for real investment: "To build a more modern infrastructure, the Budget establishes a new $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation & Finance Fund to focus on infrastructure investments of national and regional significance." But the waste of research and development funds on solar collector and biomass-energy technologies, got $6 billion.

Orszag and Romer forecast 3% GDP growth in calendar 2010 and 4.3% in 2011, "virtually identical to the consensus of private forecasters surveyed by the blue chip economic indicators and is right smack in the middle of the central tendency of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee forecast that was released back in November," Romer bragged. That's a roll-call of who was completely, 100% wrong in forecasting the economic crash!

Unconsciously mocking herself, Romer added, "I acknowledge that, like many forecasters, certainly our unemployment forecast for last year was lower than has turned out to be. And I'll say, you know, the behavior of unemployment has been unusual, given the behavior of GDP." The truth is rather that their GDP fantasy is absurd, given the "behavior" of mass unemployment. Now they trump that with the claim that inflation is running at 1%.

Obama's budget proposal cuts the Veterans Administration budget by 2.7% year-to-year, and cuts the Departments of Interior and of Housing and Urban Development; it cuts the Labor Department budget almost in half, "because the administration forecasts an economic rebound and expects fewer people to claim unemployment benefits."! It increases the Transportation Department budget by just 1% year-to-year; the NASA total budget by just 1.5% year-to-year. And in order to meet his "promise" to cut the budget deficit from 9.2% of GDP in FY2009 to 4.6% of GDP in FY2013, Obama's fiat "Budget Commission" would have to order, and Congress approve, another $180-190 billion/year in cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, or about 10% of their current combined spending.