Blogger Rich Galen begins by relating the story of the British War Cabinet, formed by Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill as part of Britain’s 100-year-long tradition “when it was determined that the very survival of the Kingdom is at risk and it is necessary to bring the best minds in Parliament to bear on the threat, notwithstanding party affiliation.”

Galen wants President Obama to do the same thing today, because …

At the end of March of 2009, remember, we were six weeks into the $787 billion stimulus package about which President Obama had claimed,”We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time.”
You know where we are. More than fourteen million Americans are out of work. Last week the government announced the economy – measured by the Gross Domestic Product – had grown at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent in the second quarter.
Worldwide the news is no better. … The chief economist of the Paris-based think tank said:
“There’s a clear drop in confidence in both business and households which reflects what they see as a lack of policy response from governments.”
Ah. “A lack of policy response from governments.” That’s what we need to focus on.
President Obama should come in from the campaign trail to reach out and call upon the best economic minds in the nation to come to Washington and figure out that the “policy response” from his government should be.
He should form an Economic War Cabinet. It even has a nifty acronym: The EWC.
He should, as Chamberlain and Churchill did when England was threatened by Germany, reach out not to just Keynesians like Paul Krugman, but to Conservative economic thinkers like Larry Lindsay. …
We wouldn’t ask them to check their ideology at the door. We would want them to set their ideologies, like their iPads, in front of them at the table. The idea would be to have them apply their considerable intellects to the problem of seeking common ground within their ideologies to help get the nation’s economies moving again.
There is no one economy of the United States. From the financial/service/engineering centers on the East and West coasts, to the vast agricultural areas between them, to the industrial Midwest (and increasingly the Southeast) there are many different economies.
It is quite likely that the EWC would decide that certain programs would help in Illinois and Michigan and others would be more beneficial to Iowa and Kansas.
If President Obama is looking for a bold idea that doesn’t include the suffix -illion, the appointment of an Economic War Cabinet would be a good place to start.

Well, Obama isn’t looking for “a bold idea that doesn’t include the suffix -illion.” He is looking to win the 2012 presidential election. Republicans in Congress are looking to prevent that from happening as well as to improve their majority in the House of Representatives and get control of the Senate.

It says a great deal about Obama’s political powers, such as they are, that Obama is reduced to complaining about Republican obstructionism when Obama’s party controls the other half of Congress. Obama’s allies in Congress, and 2012 Democratic candidates for Congress, are not exerting themselves touting Obama’s American Jobs Act, which makes one think even Democrats think it’ll prove ineffective.

It is also difficult to broker a deal when at least one side will be asked to ignore what one would think is their core principles. Republicans are not interested in raising taxes on job producers. Democrats are interested in raising taxes on millionaires (defined as a family with more than $250,000 in income), ignorant of what raising taxes in a down economy will do to that economy, because the gap between (Republican) rich and (Democratic) poor offends their sense of fairness.

An economic war cabinet that represents the complete political  spectrum will never happen, of course, because Obama has at least one similarity to former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D–Wisconsin) — they both listen only with their left ear. Obama has yet to propose a budget-balancing initiative that would include cuts that anyone would notice. Obama claims that it would be crazy to raise taxes during a recession, and yet how does he propose to fund the American Jobs Act? By raising taxes, of course. (If you eliminate tax breaks, and people end up paying more in taxes, you have in fact raised their taxes.) The fact that businesses will use tax credits for hiring new employees does not mean those credits compelled hiring new employees; businesses hire employees when the amount of their business justifies hiring new employees. And that’s not happening now.

One assumes the country will survive the next 13 months until the November 2012 elections. (Of course, you know what they say about assuming …) Just hope your savings last that long, because the only people getting rich in today’s economy are those who were rich before August 2008. And nothing coming out of Washington is likely to change that until January 2013 at the absolute earliest.