Clueless

President Obama said in his '60 Minutes' interview on Sunday:

"What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high," he said in an interview aired Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes." "People who have jobs see their incomes go up. Businesses make big profits. But they've learned to do more with less. And so they don't hire. And as a consequence, we keep on seeing growth that is just too slow to bring back the 8 million jobs that were lost."

The sit-down interview, Obama's first since Republicans gave him what he called a "shellacking" in last week's congressional midterm elections, focused heavily on the fragile economy and its starring role in the reversal of Democrats' political fortunes. He lamented his inability to make more headway in creating jobs, conceding that "I do get discouraged."

"I thought the economy would have gotten better by now," he said. "One of the things I think you understand as president is you're held responsible for everything. But you don't always have control of everything."

Conventional-wisdom, 'mainstream' economists, such as have filled the Obama Administration (Summers, Romer, etc.), seem to have no clue as to where conventional economic thinking has gone wrong.  Hence their complete failure to foresee the busted 'housing boom' and all the accompanying travails of the last 2+ years. 

The 'new normal' is where we've been headed for over 30 years, actually, and mainstream economics has been completely clueless--or worse--about it.  They need to get their heads out of their butts.  And Obama--who is not trained in economics--needs to really listen to some alternative views on these matters--a 'Team B' approach as suggested by Robert Kuttner in the Huffington Post--rather than just rely on his small group of neo-liberal, Clintonian, Ivy-League cronies.