After Obama economist Christina Romer defended the stimulus by comparing it to strep throat medication, CNN reporter Candy Crowley fired back, calling her remarks “little consolation” to the unemployed and foreclosed upon.
In a speech this morning at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., the Council of Economic Advisers chairman, compared the Recovery Act to strep throat medicine:
Suppose you go to your doctor for a strep throat and he or she prescribes an antibiotic. Sometime after you get the prescription, and maybe even after you take the first pill, your fever spikes. Do you decide that the medicine is useless? Do you conclude the antibiotic caused the infection to get worse? Surely not. You probably conclude that the illness was more serious than you and the doctor thought, and are very glad you saw the doctor and started taking the medicine when you did. That was exactly the situation with the economy.
Crowley didn’t like the analogy.
“Here’s the problem,” she said. If you’re a homeowner with an underwater mortgage, “and if you are unemployed, it’s more than your fever spiking. You are a dying patient at this point.”
“It is little consolation to tell these people you need to hold on, even though that may be what they have to do,” Crowley went on.
