Obama to nominate Alan Krueger to replace Austan Goolsbee as head of White House economic council
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Monday that he has chosen Princeton University’s Alan Krueger to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
“Alan brings a wealth of experience to the job,” Obama said, flanked by Krueger in the White House Rose Garden. “He’s one of the nation’s leading economists.”
“For more than two decades he has studied economic policy inside and outside of government,” Obama said. “It will be tough to fill the shoes of Austan Goolsbee … but I have nothing but confidence in Alan.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Krueger, a labor economist, is likely to provide a voice inside the administration for more-aggressive government action to bring down unemployment and, particularly, to address long-term joblessness.
Krueger, 50, returned to Princeton a year ago after serving as assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy during the first two years of the Obama administration — which means he has recently cleared the sometimes treacherous Senate confirmation process.
He would succeed Austan Goolsbee, who left earlier this month to reclaim his teaching post at the University of Chicago.
Krueger has been on Princeton’s faculty since 1987, the year he earned his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He did a stint as chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration.
The work he has done in academia ranges from attempts to explain why job growth wasn’t stronger during the 2000s, to findings that increases in the minimum wage don’t depress employment, to a work showing that terrorists often come from middle-class — and often college-educated — backgrounds.
While at Treasury, Krueger worked on analyses of a variety of programs, including tax incentives to encourage employers to hire the employed, the “cash for clunkers” initiative to jump-start auto purchases and Build America taxable municipal bonds.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, through a spokeswoman, said that “given his expertise in labor economics, he is precisely the right choice to lead the CEA at this moment in history.”
The council’s members generally are drawn from academia, and they often serve for only two years. Their influence has waxed and waned over time, depending on the internal dynamics of the particular White House economic team, the relationship between the president and the CEA chairman and the political agility of the council members.
Among the other candidates for the CEA chairmanship considered by the White House were Rebecca Blank, currently acting Commerce secretary, and Alan Auerbach, a public-finance specialist at UC-Berkeley.
To read more, go to The Wall Street Journal.