At DNC, Obama economists talk potential Clinton policies
Three Obama administration veterans said Wednesday that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, should push for broad infrastructure investment during her first 100 days in office.
Three Obama administration veterans said Wednesday that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, should push for broad infrastructure investment during her first 100 days in office.
"The first priority should be a decade-long, $1- to $2 trillion investment in renewing this country," Lawrence H. Summers, who was U.S. treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council for Obama, said at a Politico Caucus panel in Center City.
Summers painted a picture of peeling paint in schools, potholes in city streets, and a seemingly interminable five-year project to fix a bridge across the Charles River near his office at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
"It is insanity that we can borrow money for 30 years at 2.3 percent in a currency that we print ourselves, that our real interest rate is zero, and that we have the lowest public investment rate since the Second World War," said Summers, whose parents were professors at the University of Pennsylvania.
The point, said Summers, who is an economics professor at Harvard, is to "put workers, disproportionately the workers who have been most hurt, back to work."
Others on the Politico panel at Commerce Square in Center City were Neera Tanden, chief executive of the liberal Washington think tank Center for American Progress and advisor to Democratic presidential candidates, and Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University and former chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.
A significant chunk of the 45-minute discussion in front of a standing-room-only crowd was about the impact of trade agreements on the middle and lower classes.
It has been a hot topic during the presidential campaign because of Donald Trump's anti-trade-agreement stance and Hillary Clinton's reversal on the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive accord between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.
When she was secretary of state in 2012, Hillary Clinton said the TPP set "the gold standard in trade agreements," but last fall she turned against it under pressure from Bernie Sanders.
"I want to be crystal, crystal, crystal clear that Hillary Clinton opposes the TPP," Tanden said Wednesday, effectively acknowledging public uncertainty about Clinton's stance.
Tanden said that the country's basic view of trade has to shift. "We have to ensure that we are doing more for the economic security of all Americans before the public and others are going to open to thinking about trade," Tanden said.
Krueger pointed out that trade agreements have always been difficult for many Democrats; what has changed during the current presidential race is the Republican stance.
As it is, trade agreements are primarily foreign relations rather than economic policy, he said.
"The basic economic analysis that expanding trade increases the size of the pie and creates winners and losers is correct," but the biggest factors that affect workers are outside of trade agreements, Krueger said.
Asked about the 2016 Democratic Party Platform's support for "an updated and modernized version of Glass-Steagall as well as breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions," Summers expressed skepticism about the appropriateness of reinstituting the 1933 banking law that segregated commerical and investment banking.
Glass-Steagall would not have stopped the Lehman Bros. collapse or the AIG fiasco in 2008, he said.
Nevertheless, Summers aid: "I don't think there is any ground for complacency about where our financial system is."
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