
Richard Fisher is president of the Dallas Federal Reserve. As such, he has the power to make a depressed economy grow faster or slower. His preference is to make it grow slower, increasing unemployment and financial pressure on your family:
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said the Fed’s recent moves are giving lawmakers an excuse to avoid making hard choices on fiscal policy, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
“The more we offer accommodative monetary policy, the less incentive they have to pull their socks up and do what’s right for the American people,” Fisher told the news service in an interview.
By much the same token, if Fisher held Barack Obama’s daughters hostage and said they wouldn’t be released until he agreed to steep cuts in Social Security benefits, that would increase his incentive to make hard choices on fiscal policy. At the same time, most of us would think it would be morally wrong to make Sasha & Malia suffer in order to extract unrelated policy concessions. Holding unemployed Americans’ livelihoods hostage is less graphic, but also wrong.

Previous in TP Yglesias


By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.