Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, is out with a third video defending the Obama administration's approach to economic policy. Dry erase marker in hand, Goolsbee explains how exports will help the economy grow.
As in his first video about the tax cut debate, and his second video about job creation, Goolsbee uses a white board to put macroeconomic ideas in plain terms. The president is in Asia, Goolsbee says, to "open" Asian markets to U.S.-made products, for it is exports that will transform the currently lackluster economy into the "economy of the future."
The goal of the National Export Initiative, Goolsbee says, as he draws a bar chart, is to increase exports from the current $1.57 trillion level to $3.14 trillion by 2014. "We would literally double exports in the United States," Goolsbee says. "That would be...the biggest increase that any country has ever had. But we believe that we can do it."
The last ten years, Goolsbee says, pointing to an already-drawn chart, have seen the U.S. lag behind Germany, China, India and Japan in exports. "Now that is respectable," Goolsbee says, but it's not enough. He explains:
"The president's in Asia because it's important. More than 95 percent of the customers of the world are not in the United States. You wanna sell things, you gotta go where the customers are. We are going to grow our way out of this, and exports is going to be an important component of that. For that all patriotic Americans can agree. Because the American economy has never taken a backseat to anybody, and we are not about to start now."
Bloomberg television has promised to respond to the new video, with, as Hans Nichols said, "dueling banjo music."