Progressive Obama Fears

Still picking over the Romer/Bernstein official evaluation of the Obama economic plan. Again, kudos to the team for producing such a clear, honest assessment. But the more I look at the report, the more I wonder why anyone in the Obama team thinks the plan is adequate.

As some of us worry that the Obama team isn't showing the audacity we hoped for, and try to chivvy BHO into doing more for the economy, one demand that I've been getting is for specifics--what, exactly, should they do differently?

Up to a point, this is a fair demand. But there are two things the critics of the critics should bear in mind.

First is that we don't have many specifics from the Obama people themselves. We don't, for example, have a dollar figure for their planned public investment spending, let alone a breakdown of where the money would go. So it's kind of hard to specify what should be done differently when we don't know what they're proposing to do in the first place.

Second is that individuals or even organizations outside the government simply don't have the resources to draw up detailed economic plans.