NYT: Help Wanted: Academic Economists, Pro-Bush

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/business/yourmoney/27view.html

IT'S no secret that hurricanes and wars have swamped the economic agenda that George W. Bush planned for his second term. In the commotion, however, one fact has gone largely unnoticed: much of Washington's expert economic team has disappeared.

The chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisers will soon be vacant, and two spots on the Federal Reserve Board that were recently filled by academic economists already are. There is no assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy, and the director's chair at the Congressional Budget Office, currently occupied by Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, will soon be empty, too.

The White House and Congress need as many as five academic economists of high caliber, and it's not obvious where they will come from. The Republican Party may be facing something of a shallow bench.

Economists may not want to be political, either, she added. The reason has to do with incentives. "Everybody wants to go back into academia and be respected, so you don't want to say anything too foolish that people are going to laugh at you afterward," Professor Munnell explained.

All he needs is a few cronies who have taken an economics class in their past. Yeah, that would qualify them. Or, actually, he could go ahead and hire a few friends regardless of their backgrounds and get them right into economics classes. Kind of like he's done recently with ethics re-training....

Thanks deminks

as a consultant on how to fuck up .... generally speaking....

...want to sign up as our economist?