Politics & Power Quote by Christina Romer

The conspicuous hedging - "I think", "a little bit", "certainly" - is not verbal clutter; its the sound of policy triage happening in public. Christina Romer is threading a needle economists know too well: you can be right about stimulus now and still get kneecapped by politics later if you look indifferent to debt. The line stages a careful two-step. First, she signals internal distinction ("where I differ"), implying there are louder voices on either side: deficit hawks demanding austerity immediately, and stimulus advocates who hear any deficit talk as surrender. Then she relocates the fight to the future: "looking down the road", "as the economy recovers". Thats Keynesian sequencing dressed in Beltway etiquette.

The subtext is partly reputational. After a crisis, economists arent just forecasting; theyre defending legitimacy. By affirming deficit concern, Romer inoculates the administration against the charge that it is using emergency spending as a pretext for permanent expansion. Notice the pivot to authority: "thats something the president has said". This isnt just deference; its coalition management. She ties a technocratic argument to presidential intent to reassure markets, moderates, and skeptical legislators that there will be an exit ramp.

Context matters: this is the post-crash moment when unemployment and output gaps argued for aggressive support, while deficit rhetoric became a stand-in for moral judgment about government. Romers sentence tries to keep the economic logic intact while speaking the political dialect required to keep the policy alive.