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Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Dude, mediamatters.com's tagline is "Help us fight conservative misinformation" - that's not exactly an unbiased source. Or really any sort of respectable source to talk about economics at all. You already know what their position is going to be from the tagline.

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The source doesn't matter as I'm providing quotes from a range of well respected economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer, former chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

Not to mention quotes from AEI and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, which essentially became a conservative advocacy organization this past election.

Paul Krugman is well respected among one subset of economists and thought of as a total loon by other major subsets of economists.

I don't know much about Christina Romer, but is there any reason to believe she and Krugman constitute a "range" of economists?

More than those two are quoted.

The point is that you can't cite a partisan political site as evidence of a consensus. You already know what their positions are going to be - they're going to reference economists that agree with them (who tend to be affiliated with the Democrats, like Kurgman and Romer) and not economists who disagree with them.

lionhearted, you're missing the point. This is not a partisan issue. Please tell me things are not so divided in this country that people read partisanship into everything, even as far as HN.

T.A.R.P. was started and passed under George W. Bush. The people advising him, including Henry Paulson his Secretary of Treasury, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were telling him the same thing. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

My point in posting here is not about partisanship, but about accuracy. Economics is a science -- not an exact one, but a science nonetheless. At its core economics is not about partisanship at all. People can probably turn anything under the sun partisan, but that's their problem. Believe it or not some people are able to focus on doing their job (and providing their opinion) in the interest of the country above partisanship, like current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who is a Republican. Economists advising both sides of the aisle support the position I've outlined. I'm not going to to look them up for you, but you can feel free. I'll start you off. Look for the comment near this one by jbooth http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901677.

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