In a speech sponsored by the Center for American Progress, Dr. Alan Krueger, the Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, will address "Income Inequality: A Threat to America's Growth". The speech will occur tomorrow, Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 10 AM EST (that is 7 AM for all of you on the Left Coast) and will be livestreamed here. The room is booked solid for those of you in the Metro DC area, but we can all watch on Teh Internets™.
According to his Wikipedia bio, Dr. Krueger
is an American economist, Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. On March 7, 2009, he was nominated by President Barack Obama to be United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for economic policy.[1] In October 2010, he announced his resignation from the Treasury Department, to return to Princeton University.[2] He is among the 50 highest ranked economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. On August 29, 2011, he was nominated by Obama to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers,[3][4] and on November 3, 2011, the Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination.[5]
The Center for American Progress describes the talk thusly:
On December 6 President Barack Obama said that the kind of inequality that we have in America today, higher than at any time since the Great Depression, "hurts us all." He went on to outline how growing inequality and a shrinking middle class are at the root of our economic problems. These trends mean less stable consumption, unsustainable debt, a concentration of power in the hands of the few, and the unraveling of the American Dream that portrays the United States as a land of opportunity for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules. In short, an economy that doesn't work for all of us, isn't working.
Given how the OWS movement has brought this issue to the fore, it will be interesting to all Kossacks, I believe, regardless of where they stand on the Obama divide, to see where the Obama Administration stands on this very important issue. And, to see, as we enter this election year, just what concrete measures they propose for dealing with it.
Perhaps we can even do a Liveblog.