Bob Greenstein

My former chief, CBPP's Bob Greenstein, has an impassioned defense of his former employee Jason Furman at the Huffington Post. Bob rightly skewers some of the reporting on Furman—particularly an erroneous report that he favored Social Security privatization.

I do have to gently disagree, however, with a two of Bob's arguments. First, he states that:

Everyone involved in the 2005 debate over Bush's privatization proposal knows it was Furman's devastating analyses shredding the Bush plan and skewering the arguments of privatizers that formed the intellectual core of the successful opposition. Democratic Members of Congress, unions, and grassroots campaigns against the Bush plan built much of their critiques on Furman's work.

The suggestion that "everyone involved" in the SS debate "knows it was Furman's" work that "formed the intellectual core of the successful opposition" is a bit of an overstatement. (Also, while saying "I'm the greatest rapper alive" is standard in hip-hop, it's somewhat out of place in policy analysis). Furman's work on SS at CBPP was great, but it was only part of a larger Team Progressive effort that formed the "intellectual core" of the defense. Ezra Klein is closer to the mark when he notes that Furman:

... was a staunch ally during the Social Security privatization fight, and did as much as any economist not named Dean Baker to push back on the then-pervasive idea that Social Security was in crisis and required conservative reform.

Second, Bob suggests that Furman's hire doesn't necessarily represent a "move to the political center":

.... several news accounts, including a Huffington Post column, portrayed Obama's hiring of Furman as a move to the political center now that Obama has wrapped up the nomination. This, too, is dubious. Prior to Furman's hiring, Obama's two top advisers on economic and fiscal policy were University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee and Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman. Goolsbee, Liebman, and Furman are all moderately left of center. In fact, reading the work of all three (each of whom is considered a top-notch economists) leads one to put Furman modestly to the left, not the right, of the other two. In recent years, Furman's work has focused, in particular, on how to change government policies so the gains of economic growth are more evenly shared, with more gains going to low—and moderate—income working families and fewer to corporate profits than has recently occurred.

While it may be true that Furman is modestly to the left of Goolsbee and Liebman (the distinction isn't clear to me based on their written work), the real divide here involves Furman's views on fiscal policy as well as the role of economic institutions—particularly collective bargaining, new basic labor standards like paid leave, and other forms of market regulation—in creating an economy that works for all Americans.

Obama doesn't exactly have a boldly progressive economic agenda, but it includes many progressive elements—such as paid sick days and leave, indexing (not just increasing) the minimum wage, and expanding collective bargaining—that Furman, as far as I can tell, has never publicly endorsed. In my view, the biggest problem with Furman's infamous Wal-Mart paper is precisely his failure to include these reforms, as well as universal health care, as recommendations to "change government policies so the gains of economic growth are more evenly shared." In a subsequent online debate with Barbara Ehrenreich, he had a perfect opportunity to correct this imbalance, but failed to do so—instead, again quoting Ezra Klein, riding his initial argument "to a level of dogmatism that appears unwise."

Greenstein's case for Furman would actually have been strengthened if he had acknowledged the obvious: Furman is pretty much a 1990s-style "third way" guy with the pros and cons that ideology entails. Among the pros, Furman supports the current welfare state and would increase government transfers to low- and moderate-income folks: the cons, he wouldn't require much more from corporate American (other than an increase in the minimum wage). Moreover, he hasn't publicly made the same moves to the left as some others in the Rubin camp. Importantly, Obama is already on record supporting many of the key elements of a progressive economic agenda, one that does require more from business. It's our job to make sure he holds to those positions whoever his advisers may be.