Kevin Hassett

Kevin Hassett
Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Nominee
Taking office TBD*
President	Donald Trump
Succeeding	Jason Furman
Personal details
Born	Greenfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Education	Swarthmore College (BA) University of Pennsylvania (MA, PhD)
*Pending Senate confirmation

Kevin Allen Hassett is an American economist. He is known for his work on tax policy and for coauthoring the book Dow 36,000, published in 1999. Hassett is currently the State Farm James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture and Director of Research for Domestic Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.^[1] He was John McCain's chief economic adviser in the 2000 presidential primaries and an economic adviser to the campaigns of George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election and McCain in the presidential election of 2008. He was among Mitt Romney's economic advisers for the 2012 presidential campaign.^[2]

In early 2017, Hassett was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to become the 29th chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.^[3][4]

Education and early career

Hassett is a native of Greenfield, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Greenfield High School and played for Turnbull's in the Greenfield Minor League. He received a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He was an assistant professor of economics at Columbia Business School from 1989 to 1993 and an associate professor there from 1993 to 1994. From 1992 to 1997, Hassett was an economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. He served as a policy consultant to the United States Treasury Department during the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.^[5]

American Enterprise Institute

Hassett joined AEI as a resident scholar in 1997. He worked on tax policy, fiscal policy, energy issues, and investing in the stock market. He collaborated with R. Glenn Hubbard on work on the budget surplus, income inequality, and tax reform. Hassett published papers and articles on capital taxation, the consistency of tax policy, returns on energy conservation investments, corporate taxation, telecommunications competition, the effects of taxation on wages, dividend taxation, and carbon taxes.^[5]

In 2003, Hassett was named director of economic policy studies at AEI. During his tenure at AEI, he became an increasingly prolific popular writer, penning articles in major newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He writes a monthly column for National Review and, since 2005, a weekly column for Bloomberg.^[6]

Dow 36,000

Hassett is coauthor with James K. Glassman of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. It was published in 1999 before the dot-com bubble burst. The book's title was based on a calculation that, in the absence of the equity premium, stock prices would be approximately four times as high as they actually were. In its introduction, Glassman and Hassett wrote that the book "will convince you of the single most important fact about stocks at the dawn of the twenty-first century: They are cheap... If you are worried about missing the market's big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones industrial average."^[7] The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,681.06 on the day of the book's publication.^[8]

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argued on his faculty website that the book contained basic arithmetic errors and was "a very silly book" but regarded Hassett's role as co-author as a "youthful indiscretion."^[9] Statistician and blogger Nate Silver described the book as "charlatanic" and suggested on empirical grounds that the authors had failed to notice that at the time of writing stock prices were "as overvalued as at literally any time in American history".^[10]

Views on immigration

According to the The New York Times, Hassett's nomination by President Trump to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, met with opposition by Trump supporters who are anti-illegal immigration, such as Breitbart, American Renaissance, Infowars, the Center for Immigration Studies and "leaders of the white nationalist 'alt-right' movement".^[11] Hassett—"like most economists...believes that immigration spurs economic growth." Prior to Hassett's nomination, President Trump "broke with recent tradition and removed the council’s chairman from a cabinet-level position.^[11]

Bibliography

• Hassett, Kevin. 'Spending, Taxes and Certainty: A Road Map to 4%', in The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, edited by Brendan Miniter. New York: Crown Business. 2012.
• Alan J. Auerbach and Kevin A. Hassett, eds. Toward Fundamental Tax Reform. Washington: AEI Press, 2005. (ISBN 0844742341)
• Kevin A. Hassett. Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers. New York: Crown Business, 2002. (ISBN 0609609297)
• Kevin A. Hassett and R. Glenn Hubbard, eds. Inequality and Tax Policy. South Bend, Ind.: Washington: AEI Press, 2001. (ISBN 0844741442)
• ———. Transition Costs of Fundamental Tax Reform. Washington: AEI Press, 2001. (ISBN 0844741124)
• James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. New York: Times Books, 1999. (ISBN 0609806998)
• Kevin A. Hassett and R. Glenn Hubbard. The Magic Mountain: A Guide to Defining and Using a Budget Surplus. New York: Free Press, 1999. (ISBN 0844771279)
• Kevin A. Hassett. Tax Policy and Investment. Washington: AEI Press, 1999. (ISBN 0844770868)
• Hassett, Kevin A. (2008). "Investment". In David R. Henderson (ed.). Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2nd ed.). Indianapolis: Library of Economics and Liberty. ISBN 978-0865976658. OCLC 237794267. CS1 maint: Extra text: editors list (link)

References

External links

• Kevin Hassett bio at AEI
• Appearances on C-SPAN