christina romer is the former chair of president obama's counsel of economic advisers. a, thank you so much for your time. it's nice to have you here. >> it's great to be with you. >> you are an expert on the economic side of this, about what types of policies the government can pursue to try to right the economy when it's in a bad way and try to get maximize employment to the extent we can. how important is infrastructure investment in the universe of different spending policies and fiscal policies that the government can adopt. >> it's incredibly important. i think if you were to say what is the one small silver lining to this horrible recession that we have been through is that it has at least generated a lot of new research on what can fiscal policy do, what can government spending do? and the overwhelming conclusion of all of that research is that government spending absolutely can help you recover from a recession, and among the kinds of government spending that's the most useful, it's infrastructure. it's important to define it broaddy, so of course it's roads and

. >> clayton: so, of course, the white house has long defended that argument saying that was christina romerent into effect it wouldn't reach above 8%. they say that only half of the stimulus went into effect and therefore that's why you get those numbers. any way you pars them it's not positive for the president. because this prediction back in 2009 showed that unemployment rate projected to top off in mid 2009 at 8%. and then drop to 7% by the end of the quarter of 2010. that was, given those projections from the bureau of labor statistics, given the stimulus money and other forms of spending. >> i think right now that projection had it around 5.6%. which clearly would be an amazing turn around for this economy in the next eight years. >> alisyn: by the way, one of the people, the top economist in the administration at the time was jared bernstein, he says their projections were flawed. he admits their projections are flawed. they use incomplete data. they didn't realize he says that the economy was constricting at the rate that it was. and now, what he says, is that there is no way in 201