From the salmon-coloured pages of the Financial Times:
The impact of Barack Obama’s roughly $800bn fiscal stimulus has been underestimated and will increasingly be felt over the coming months, says Lawrence Summers, the head of the White House National Economic Council.
“It is an enormous achievement . . . that with all the projects across the country – weatherisation, medical records, high-speed rail, what have you – that there have been essentially no reports, zero, of corruption, of abuse or of egregious delay,” Mr Summers told the Financial Times in a video interview for its View from DC series.
This is a mind-numbingly stupid thing for Summers to say, just days after weatherization projects were mathematically proven to be wasteful and demonstrably, egregiously delayed.
Moreover, the jury is still very much out on the virtues of throwing good money after a bad high-speed rail pipe dream, especially now that it’s become clear California’s rail proponents lied about most of their plan’s details to convince voters they should authorize billions in borrowing for the LA to SF line.
