Senator Obama chooses Jason Furman econ advisor

By: Divorced one like Bush

From this story at Common Dreams comes the news that Senator Obama has chosen Jason Furman as an economic advisor. The story notes Mr. Furman’s fame for his defending of the Walmart model. The one that states Walmart is helping the less fortunate. I don’t buy it in the big picture scheme of viewing. In fact, we at AB have had this discussion and I even posted a link to a report from the EPI which noted not everything related to ones financial well being can be bought at Walmart. Frankly, there are some very big items that are not on Walmart’s shelves that take up a large portion of ones budget.

He has held a good position at the Brookings. Note that bit about director of economic policy for the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Not to keen on the Hamilton Project though:

The offices belong to the Hamilton Project, a small think tank created by Robert E. Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and key economic adviser, and former Treasury deputy secretary Roger C. Altman, who would be a front-runner for the same job in a new Clinton administration.

Is this the concession the Clinton/Blue Dog group was looking for? The DLC still keeps control of the money issues? This article suggests some recent Hamilton Project influencing.Do we really need Chicago School lite? Are we that timid that we couldn’t try another school of thought? Now that would be “change”.

Then I read this in the Common Dreams article:

One economist who has disputed some of Mr. Furman’s findings on Wal-Mart said the disagreement shouldn’t disqualify him. “That’s small potatoes. Jason’s economic agenda goes way beyond that,” Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute said. “That’s not anything close to a deal breaker.”

Well ok? If the EPI can say there is more to this young man than Walmart, I need to go looking. I found this from Mr. Furman’s article on corporate taxes:

“We should consider tax reform in the classic 1986 mode: lower tax rates and broaden the tax base by limiting special exemptions. Both halves of this classic equation have the potential for helping the economy by eliminating the perverse incentives to invest in tax-favored activities rather than in more economically productive activities. “

Alrighty, there is more to his thinking. He relates our health care problems to the tax code also:

Not only do we spend more than any other country on health care, nearly 50 percent more per capita than the second-highest-spending nation, but citizens in 28 other countries have a higher life expectancy and 33 other nations have lower infant mortality rates.

If this were a government-run health care system, the voting public and policymakers would be up in arms. Yet, perhaps because health care is largely perceived as a private-sector concern, there is relative quiet: while voters tell pollsters that it is a top priority, there appears not to be comparable political pressure for serious reform or any fundamental change in the government’s involvement, either in the provision or funding of health care. This is in part because much of the federal government’s involvement with the health care system is through the hidden backdoor of the tax code. An importantprinciple for modern progressives is that when the government has to intervene in the marketplace, it should not prop up failure. Yet the federal government is, in fact, deeply involved in perpetuating the current “private” health care system and all its flaws, spending approximately $200 billion annually in subsidizing employer-provided insurance. It is the single biggest subsidy in our tax system, more than twice as costly as the mortgage interest deduction. The only government programs that cost more are Social Security, national defense, and Medicare.

Interesting perspective…yes? But, I’m not so sure he is correct with the solution, though I can now see why Senator Obama has put him at the table:

In fact, if we turned our irrational health tax subsidies right-side up–by curbing subsidies for higher-income workers and those with more generous health insurance plans–we could raise tens of billions of dollars annually, money that could go toward increasing access to health insurance. Taking it a step further, we could scrap the current deduction altogether and replace it with progressive tax credits that, together with other changes, would ensure that every American has affordable health insurance.

Not exactly a Mrs. Edward solution if I have read her correctly.

This person, Mr. Furman seems to fit well with Senator Obama’s other econ advisor, Mr. Austan Goolsbee. I think we can now start making some educated guess on what to expect for proposed solutions to the shift of income share to the top 1%. You know: It’s the economy stupid, Show me the money, declining real wages, consumer economy with little to spend, (add your’s here…). We’re going to try a new version of trickle down which has some form of tax code tightening, but no direct social policy influencing. Social influencing, like say, we use the tax code to make it more profitable for the company to pay the help as oppose to paying the very top management and shareholders.