The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday reported upside revisions to the number of jobs that were created in last year's fourth quarter.
Appearing on CNBC's Squawk Box, Austan Goolsbee, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama, joked, "It’s an elaborate left-wing plot to make the numbers much better several months after the election so that nobody thinks that there was a conspiracy just before the election."
Each month before the jobs report is released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hosts and guests of CNBC make predictions about the payroll employment number and unemployment rate.
On April 6, when the March data was released Steve Liesman was the high end predictor, with 290,000, and former Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee was low, with 180,000. But everyone turned out to be wrong, when the BLS report showed gains of only 120,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.2 percent.
The easy catch in former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee's Thursday interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," as reported by the Politico's Tim Mak, is that he believes that "if given a second chance he would not have backed the Cash for Clunkers program or the home buyer tax credit." Goolsbee's excuse for his changed position -- that the administration didn't think the recovery would take so long, when the administration's policies have primarily explain why the recovery has taken so long -- is characteristically lame.
Something else Goolsbee said is far more surprising -- so surprising that one wonders if famed supply-side economist Arthur Laffer somehow temporarily took over the former Obama adviser's mind and body. One also wonders why Mak saved what Goolsbee said for his report's final two paragraphs instead of headlining and leading with it.
Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.
Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.)
General Electric (NYSE:GE) is the parent company of the major media conglomerate NBC Universal, which owns media outlets NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. At times that has led to the lines between corporate advocacy and journalism being blurred.
That was certainly the case when GE's CEO Jeff Immelt appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" May 20 to discuss the White House meeting of President Barack Obama's 16-member Economic Recovery Advisory Board headed by former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker.
Immelt used his platform at CNBC to make the case for a cap-and-trade program to curb emissions - something Obama has called for and one Congressional committee is debating this week.
Perhaps the media's Obama lovefest isn't as infectious as previously thought - at least in some corners of the financial media. For the second day in a row CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera noted low taxes - a conservative economic ideal - trumps those of the left, both economically and politically.
Caruso-Cabrera and "Squawk Box" co-anchor Joe Kernan interviewed Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the chief economic policy adviser for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, on August 15. The day before, the two interviewed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's senior economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.
"You know what I just love, Doug?" Caruso-Cabrera asked. "Everybody and their mother, whenever they want to endorse their tax plan - they want to cite the almighty Ronald Reagan, right? I mean, everybody wants to dump all over the Republicans, but when they want to tout their economic and their tax plan, who do they go back to? The guy who cut taxes and cut taxes."
It's not often someone in the media challenges the liberal point-of-view - especially on the issue of taxes when they become a means to redistribute income.
CNBC "Squawk Box" fill-in co-host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera wasn't afraid to buck the trend and challenge Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's senior economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.
Goolsbee appeared on the August 14 "Squawk Box" to defend an op-ed he wrote for the August 14 Wall Street Journal outlining Obama's tax plan. Caruso-Cabrera invoked the name of Milton Friedman, an economist who was a primary defender of free markets throughout the 20th century. Ironically, Friedman taught at the University of Chicago, where Goolsbee is a faculty member.
"WWMD, Austin - what would Milton do? Remember that," Caruso-Cabrera said. "Remember your roots - what got you to where you are."
♪♫ ♪ Say, say, one, nine, three, zero, party over, oops, out of time! So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1929! ♪♫ ♪