by Gwynn Guilford
What plan? asks Brad DeLong, in his point-for-point takedown of this baldly disingenuous whitepaper by Romney's economic advisers:
There is no Romney program—a program is complete, coherent, and scoreable, Romney has repeatedly said that his statements are not scoreable. In order to estimate the economic effect of any program, you have to know what its pieces will do–you need to have it scored. … One of the most annoying things here is the partisan asymmetry: the rules of the game seem to be that Democratic proposals have to be scoreable and coherent, while Republican proposals don't.
The entire piece is worth reading. Yglesias piles on:
[O]ne view is that we've done about as well as we could have, and another view is that we didn't have appropriately stimulative monetary and fiscal policies. The white paper's four authors seem to be trying to put a third hypothesis on the table, namely that as a giant cosmic coincidence the Obama administration put in policies that so severely crippled America's long-term growth potential as to prevent even short-term catch-up growth despite the presence of appropriately stimulative policies.
