Everything you could expect in terms of "economic policy" in a Jeb Bush Administration is contained in this short clip from Inside Job, featuring Jeb's newly-hired top Economic advisor, Glenn Hubbard. Hubbard, you may recall, was George W. Bush's chief economist, the principle architect of the Bush tax cuts, and wrote a paper co-authored with Goldman Sachs in which he praised and encouraged the essentially unregulated trading in derivatives that ultimately led to the Financial crisis. After all these years, the sheer contempt he shows the interviewer still makes your blood boil:.
Today's New York Times sounded the warning about this ill-tempered conservative hack:
Jeb Bush is said to have brought on Glenn Hubbard as an economic adviser — the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and a prominent conservative who served as President George W. Bush’s chief economist and was an architect of the big tax cuts in 2001, which favored the wealthy. He can be expected to weigh in on wage stagnation and income inequality, campaign issues that all the candidates, including Mr. Bush, have said they will address.
Admittedly, few Americans are waiting with bated breath for a Republican "solution" to wage stagnation and income inequality, since these issues affect a constituency of Americans whom the Republican Party simply does not represent. Here is Hubbard's considered take on wage stagnation, for example,
made in response to questions posed by the Times' staff:
When asked about the generation-long stagnation on middle-class incomes, Mr. Hubbard argued that “compensation didn’t stagnate,” citing large increases that employers have paid out in health and pension benefits. “Global changes in the market make it difficult to get wage gains,” he added.
In short, Hubbard denies that wage stagnation even exists. It follows, of course, that if wage stagnation doesn't exist, there can be no income inequality, as everything is just churning along swimmingly as it always has, in this best of all possible worlds. And in fact, Hubbard runs from the concept like a scalded dog:
He does not worry about economic inequality. He pointed out, near the end of the interview, that he had never mentioned the word. “I’m not as vexed about inequality,” he said, “as I am about opportunity.”
Hubbard's answer betrays a curious myopia, even for a conservative, as he is apparently unaware that the average worker's health care costs have skyrocketed and pensions, more or less, are no longer offered by most private employers. As the
Times points out:
For the broad middle class, more than three-fourths of family income is from wages and salaries, which have stagnated since the late 1970s, with the exception of one growth period in the latter half of the 1990s. Since then, wages have been flat or falling for most of the work force, including college graduates, a consequence of the underlying weakness in the bubble economy of the George W. Bush years and ensuing income losses from the financial crisis and its aftermath.
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In general, health and retirement benefits in the private sector have become less generous in recent decades, while public-sector employees have had relatively more success in holding on to valuable benefits. For private-sector employees, the share of compensation represented by benefits has largely been flat since the government began to separately track private-sector data in 1987.
Hubbard knows this, of course. He is, after all, the Dean of Columbia Business School. But for him to acknowledge it would displease the corporate masters who provide him with a hefty income, as evidenced in the film clip above. It would also render him useless to Jeb Bush, a leading candidate to be those same corporations' toady-in-chief. Much like he
auditioned to be Mitt Romney's economist, Hubbard has been making the rounds testing the waters as a surrogate for George W. Bush's brother.
Hubbard's been making noises designed to make himself seem more "moderate" and palatable, doubtlessly after consulting with Jeb's handlers. As the Post article notes, the slippery Hubbard won't acknowledge whether he's been tapped by the Bush campaign.
In a recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal (reprinted here in the SE Missourian) Hubbard touts what is expected to be one of Jeb Bush's campaign promises--4% economic growth. His prescriptions to obtain this imaginary figure are rooted in snake oil Reaganomics (which he actually praises), "regulatory reform," i.e., deregulation for oil and gas companies and other polluters as well as the financial industry that pads his salary, relaxation of labor standards, private school vouchers, more and more so-called "free trade" and of course, huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
In other words, exactly the same set of policy blunders that caused the Financial Crisis to begin with.