A “false choice” is cookies or cupcakes. The answer is clearly “both.” (ap)
President Obama and his chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, both uncannily talked about “false choices” today on TARP spending and the deficit — but that may be where their message coordination ended, because they offered two pretty different false choices:
On MSNBC, Goolsbee said:
“Everybody knows who has lived through this crisis, you can’t start talking about reducing the deficit until you’ve got the economy growing again and turned around.
“So I think it’s a bit of a false, false choice between getting deficits down and stimulating jobs because you really need to stimulate jobs before you can get the deficit down.”
Obama, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, said the “false choice” is thinking you can’t do both at once:
“Now, there are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. This is a false choice,” Obama said.
“Ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment insurance so that our deficits will start coming down. At the same time, instilling confidence in our commitment to being fiscally prudent gives the private sector the confidence to make long-term investments in our people and in America.”
Erm?
