Christina Romer on the stimulus | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook: CHRISTINA ROMER: $787 billion of stimulus... has been passed. We’re... focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that’s absolutely the right strategy. That’s certainly going to be the money that can get out the door the quickest and we are already doing that, so I think it makes sense to concentrate on that....
[T]he way I described what happened back in December and January and February was we got a tremendous amount of new information... everybody was [changing] their forecasts very quickly....[T]he important thing... is to concentrate on where we are now, and where we are now is with a lot of fiscal stimulus there already approved... we always knew it would take some time... to actually get the money there and employing people... it is ramping up substantially over the next couple of quarters....
[W]e absolutely have to think about the deficit looking down the road.... [T]he president has said that we need to... have a plan in place for getting it down.... [T]his is why healthcare reform is so important... the number one thing that’s going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare....
[P]ople have forgotten... what the economy... was like in December and January. We were truly an economy in freefall.... We’ve started to see some of those leading indicators... turn around.... [W]hat I’m going to be looking at is: Are we on the right path? And certainly we do have to give the stimulus the time to have an effect....
[T]oday we just got some information that initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped a lot.... there’s a fair amount of noise in our indicators. I’m going to be looking at all of the indicators...
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