Tag: Kevin Hassett

Kevin Hassett, senior Trump economic adviser, to leave White House

Washington Post logoHe had emerged as a leading voice on the economic impact of the coronavirus. It will be the second time he has left the Trump White House.

One of President Trump’s most trusted economic advisers will leave the White House this summer amid one of the worst economic crises in decades.

Kevin Hassett, who returned to the White House as an unpaid volunteer in March, said in an interview that his departure is in line with the administration’s initial plan when he was brought back. Hassett said his agreement was to return to the White House for about 90 days, and he has already stayed for more than that amount of time.

But Hassett’s upcoming departure — first reported by Axios — could alarm critics who worry that the White House lacks respected economic officials to guide the nation through the economic calamity caused by the virus. Continue reading.

White House officials downplay chance of COVID-19 ‘second spike’

The Hill logoWhite House economic officials on Friday downplayed concerns about recent spikes in cases of the novel coronavirus in several U.S. states amid fears on Wall Street about a new wave of COVID-19.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on “Fox & Friends” that the developments did not signify a “second spike” nationally of COVID-19, citing conversations with White House health experts the evening prior.

Speaking later on Fox News, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett described some “embers flaring up” in various states, pointing to troubling data in South Carolina and Arizona, but he insisted that cases nationally continue to decline. Continue reading.

Top Trump Adviser’s Model Predicts Deaths At Zero By May 15

A Trump administration economic adviser with no experience in epidemiology created a coronavirus model that predicted deaths from the virus dropping to near zero by May 15, the Washington Post reported. The model offers an extremely optimistic prediction that no others have shown.

The adviser who created the model, Kevin Hassett, has denied it plays a role in decisions related to the virus. “I have never, ever said that that’s my projection of what the death count was going to be, and no administration policy has been influenced by my projections,” he told the Post.

However, according to a Post report, Trump and his aides used that model to justify plans to start reopening the economy. White House officials, like Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, were reported to have relied on it because it “affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term,” the Post reported. Continue reading.

Kevin Hassett, President Trump’s top economist, to leave White House

Kevin Hassett, the White House’s top economist, will leave the administration, President Trump announced on Twitter late Sunday, on the eve of his trip to Europe.

Hassett, 57, who has served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers since September 2017, is leaving as Trump confronts an increasingly hostile trade war on two fronts — with China and with Mexico, the latter of which Trump threatened with tariffs last week if it doesn’t do more to stem illegal migration.

A longtime conservative economist, Hassett helped shape the 2017 Republican tax law and has been a staunch defender of the president’s policies on other issues. Historically, he has been an advocate of open trade policies, although in recent months he has been put in the position of defending Trump’s most confrontational approach.

View the complete June 2 article by Jeff Stein on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s top economist says he can’t explain Trump’s false tweet on the economy

The following article by Damian Paletta and Jeff Stein was posted on the Washington Post website September 10, 2018:

Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett said Sept. 10 he couldn’t explain President Trump’s false tweet about the economy. (The Washington Post)

The White House’s top economist on Monday acknowledged that President Trump had made a false statement hours earlier when he used a pair of statistics to describe the strong economy.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, speaking in the White House press room, said he did not know how Trump obtained the false information.

“The history of thought about how errors happen is not something I can engage in, because from the initial fact to what the president said, I don’t know the whole chain of command,” Hassett said.

View the complete article here.

Lawrence Summers: One last time on who benefits from corporate tax cuts

The following article by Lawrence H. Hummers was posted on the Washington Post website October 22, 2017:

Kevin Hassett, President Trump’s chief economist, estimated Monday that the administration’s plan to cut corporate tax rates will cause average household incomes to jump $4,000 a year. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

I recently asserted that Kevin Hassett deserved a failing grade for his “analysis” projecting that the Trump administration proposal to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent would raise the wages of an average American family between $4,000 to $9,000. I chose harsh language because Hassett had, for what seemed like political reasons, impugned the integrity of people like Len Burman and Gene Steuerle who have devoted their lives to honest rigorous evaluation of tax measures by calling their work “scientifically indefensible” and “fiction.” Since there have been a variety of comments on the economics of corporate tax reduction, some further discussion seems warranted.

The analysis from Hassett, chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), relies heavily on correlations between corporate tax rates and wages in other countries to argue that a cut in the corporate tax rate would boost returns to labor very substantially. Perhaps unintentionally, the CEA ignores our own historical experience in their analysis. As Frank Lysy noted, the corporate tax cuts of the late 1980s did not result in increased real wages. Actually, real wages fell. The same is true in the United Kingdom, as highlighted by Kimberly Clausing and Edward Kleinbard. These examples feel far more relevant to the corporate tax issue analysis than comparisons to small economies and tax havens like Ireland and Switzerland upon which the CEA relies.

Continue reading “Lawrence Summers: One last time on who benefits from corporate tax cuts”