Trump Picks Neocon to Head Council of Economic Advisors

Monday, April 10, 2017
By Paul Martin

by Bob Adelmann
TheNewAmerican.com
Monday, 10 April 2017

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Kevin Hassett (shown) as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors. Immediately, Glenn Hubbard, a neocon serving as a visiting scholar at the “conservative” American Enterprise Institute (AEI), piped up to laud Hassett’s nomination and Trump’s wisdom in selecting him for the position: “He’s not just a standard-issue really good economist, [Hassett is] someone who knows how policy works. The tax changes being considered are really aimed at boosting investment, so I think Kevin is exactly the right person.”

He’s the right person if Trump wants someone whose resumé includes stints at the Federal Reserve with experience advising Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He’s the right person if Trump is looking for a Keynesian who believes with all his heart that the economy can be managed and manipulated into certain behaviors with certain predictable outcomes. He’s the man for the job if Trump doesn’t care where his political sympathies lie.

For instance, even though Hassett has been a resident scholar at the AEI for 20 years, he has no problem teaming up with other “scholars” at outfits such as the far-left Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). In 2012, he partnered with Dean Baker, a co-director of the CEPR, in writing an op-ed piece for the liberal New York Times, “The Human Disaster of Unemployment.” In that piece he advocated for more government spending that “should appeal to the left and the right [and] spend money to help expand public and private training programs … expand entrepreneurial opportunities by increasing access to small-business financing … [and] explore subsidies for private employers who hire [the] long-term unemployed.”

The CEPR has for years trumpeted the “success” of the socialist revolution taking place in Venezuela. As an example, in June 2016 Mark Weisbrot, the other co-founder of the outfit, got the New York Times to publish “A U.S. Policy of Non-Intervention in Venezuela Would Be a Welcome Change,” claiming that “Washington has caused enormous damage to Venezuela in its relentless pursuit of ‘regime change’ for the last 15 years.” The CEPR boasts far-left ideologues Danny Glover and Julian Bond as board members, and financial support from the Ford Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Rest…HERE

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