It was a big conference primarily of very high ranking Republicans. The speaker before me was Senator Dole. But I actually won over a lot of the audience. Not that I convinced them to change their positions, but they believed that I was earnestly trying to explain the situation, how I understood it, why we were doing what we were doing. And frankly, the other thing you need to do as a professional economist is recognize all the time the limitations on our knowledge.
Nothing is perfect.
It was a trade-off. There were political costs, and there were even some economic costs. And if you say that to people, so you've given them a full representation of the situation, they're more likely to believe you. Now, inside the halls of the administration, that approach also worked very well, just going in and taking the arguments and facts and trying to present trade-offs. Where it worked less well, and perhaps not well at all, was in testimony before Congress.