Obama's Advisers..."Obamanomics"Austan Goolsbee - Jeffrey Liebman - David Cutler

I gotta say, Obama confounds me. It's as if he's using his liberal reputation to win the primary activists' votes, but is building a much more centrist agenda for the general election.
We know that Bill and Hillary are both DLC'ers (Democratic Leadership Council). But the DLC is the attempt by Democrats to bring the party back to the center. What the press dubbed "triangulation" was often actually Clinton throwing a McCain type maverick action into the gears of the leftist ideological machine. Do you get it? Only McCain is a "maverick" BECAUSE he's a Republican. When Bill Clinton did the same sort of maneuver, he was a "political genius." McCain is a "thorn" in the party's side, while Clinton "triangulates," when he makes an out-of-character-for-his-party type of move.
And so I think we may be in for some strange maverick triangulation with an Obama administration. Obama's chief economist is the impressive chief economist for the DLC, Austan Goolsbee.
George Will's October 4, '07 column is devoted to Goolsbee's thinking on a range of issues and it's well worth the read. Will concludes with this paragraph...

Economics is the only academic discipline that in recent decades has moved in the direction that America and much of the world has moved, to the right. Goolsbee no doubt has lots of dubious ideas -- he is, after all, a Democrat -- about how government can creatively fiddle with the market's allocation of wealth and opportunity. But he seems to be the sort of person -- amiable, empirical and reasonable -- you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be.

I hesitate to link to any of the leftist opinion sites, not only because of what else one might find on their web pages but also because of the language used to describe the "sellout" Obama is committing by signing these guys on to his team. (So consider this fair warning, I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary on these provided links, and the reading is interesting, but...) They are in apoplectic tailspin over the trio's ideas that SocSec might be "partially privatized," or that health-care need not be single payer (completely nationalized) or that welfare isn't good for everyone, or that free trade is a good thing. Even the the semi-official publication to the paranoid left, "The Nation," has noticed, as evidenced by this note in an article about the various solutions to the "sub-prime crisis"....

As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.

Not that Obama's presidency will have conservatives in all out party mode. From the NRO's Larry Kudlow ...

This is disturbing news on the taxation front. The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore says Obama’s tax plan would add up to a 39.6 percent personal income tax, a 52.2 percent combined income and payroll tax, a 28 percent capital-gains tax, a 39.6 percent dividends tax, and a 55 percent estate tax. In other words, Sen. Obama is a very-high-tax candidate. Whether Wall Street has fully discounted this, I have no idea. Probably not yet. But somebody in the investor class ought to be thinking about it, because it’s not good.

Interestingly, at least two of Obama’s top economic advisors — Austan Goolsbee and Jeffrey Liebman — are highly regarded free-market economists. Goolsbee from Chicago, Liebman from Harvard. But somehow their candidate has a very punitive high-tax campaign plan for the economy.

On healthcare, the libs fault Obama's plan for aloowing folks the freedom to opt out, as opposed to Hillary's "mandate" for participation. The following speaks of economist David Cutler on healthcare.....

But then you get a Harvard economist saying this about mandates: “A better approach is to do everything possible to make it affordable and available. When it is, almost everyone will have it.”

I think by “it” he’s referring to health insurance and this is the same Harvard economist who thinks our current health care system provides “reasonable value”.

I am eagerly awaiting Cutler’s explanation of how he reconciles the “reasonable value” we are allegedly currently getting from the health care system with the presumably massive reduction in prices/costs of health care that’s going to be needed to make insurance “affordable”. I guess we’ll just be getting excellent value then!

CODA: By the way if you doubt that Democrats favor single payer then consider these two questions from the recent Gallup Poll:

"Do you think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care, or don't you think so?"

84% of Democrats say yes. compared to 54% of independents and only 32% of Republicans

The leftist blogger has a point. We are still detail "challenged" - shall we say?