Barack Obama needs to clean house, starting with his kitchen cabinet of economic advisers.
But instead, he’s serving up leftovers on some of the same old dirty dishes.
Take Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s choice to be his new head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
It was Goolsbee, during the presidential campaign, who said Obama’s talk of renegotiating NAFTA was just “political posturing.”
And it was Goolsbee who urged Obama not to bail out the auto companies. Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to him then.
Why should he listen to him now?
Or take Tim Geithner, please. Geithner, who once notoriously said, “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.”
And he has done his best to preserve the interests of private shareholders, but not of the public. Just look at the bank bailouts.
According to media reports, Obama may even keep Larry Summers on.
Obama’s economic policies have been not nearly ambitious enough in the face of the crisis he inherited.
So he should discard the people who designed them, instead of reusing them over and over again.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his article “Newt Gingrich, Mudslinger.”
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