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Three Cheers for Jared Bernstein, Named Chief Economist to Biden |
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How’s this for change in Washington after eight years of conservative and corporate- fawning economic policy? Respected progressive economist Jared Bernstein was named Friday to the newly created post of chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.
Bernstein is a 16-year veteran of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and mostly recently served as EPI’s director of living standards program.
Says Biden:
Jared Bernstein is an acclaimed economist and a proven, passionate advocate for raising the incomes of middle class families. His expertise and background in a wide range of domestic and international economic policies will be an invaluable asset to the Obama-Biden administration.
Jonathan Cohn at TNR.com writes this about Bernstein:
Today most economists to the left of center will tell you that inequality has been rising for about 30 years, thanks to broader changes in the economy and government’s failure to compensate adequately for them. But in the late 1990s, when the economy was humming along, not too many people were making a fuss about this.
Among the few exceptions were Jared Bernstein and his colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute—who repeatedly warned that lower- and middle-income people were not getting their share.
From our friends at Think Progress:
Bernstein is a renowned progressive economist, with expertise on the middle-class squeeze, income inequality and mobility, low-wage labor markets and poverty.
Here’s a good example of the change of thinking about economics that Bernstein represents. In October, on HuffingtonPost he took Republican presidential candidate John McCain to task for espousing more Bush-like medicine to fix the failing economy.
If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s what came to mind this A.M. when I read that John McCain’s plan to address the ailing economy includes a big cut in the capital gains tax rate, from 15 percent to 7.5 percent for the next two years.
How wrongheaded is this? Let me count the ways.
Click here to count along with Bernstein.
As EPI President Larry Mishel says:
We are thrilled to know that his experience and vision will be a part of the discussion leading us forward at this time of economic crisis.
Read some of Bernstein’s posts slamming the conservative economic ideology of the Bush administration and calling for more working/middle class polices on HuffingtonPost and Daily Kos.
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this is a token appointment to appease ‘progressives’ after Obama sold out and appointed the architects of capitalist excess to his economic team. Bernstein will have little effect balancing the horrific policies of New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers as the director of the National Economic Council, or the decrepit Reaganite Paul Volker. Biden himself is responsible for supporting corporate welfare at the expense of workers and the poor. Another reason we need a Labor Party and socialism.