Radical Bernstein should not chair the Council of Economic Advisers
Quin Hillyer
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The Senate Banking Committee on Thursday ought to kill the nomination of left-wing academic Jared Bernstein for the chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisers. Bernstein clearly lacks the necessary credentials, wisdom, and objectivity.
The Council of Economic Advisers chair should be a dispassionate economist, but Bernstein is a crusading leftist ideologue. The Atlantic in 2020 said “progressives” saw him as “Joe Biden’s Man of the Left,” someone who “would be a savvy insider whose backroom machinations” would “shove” the administration far away from the center. Bernstein has pushed radical policies against fossil fuels — directly hurting the economy of Montana, whose Democratic senator, Jon Tester, sits on the Banking Committee — and Bernstein so fully shares the identity politics obsessions of the Left that he wants the Federal Reserve to take on a new mission of “delivering more racial equity.”
BIDEN RESHUFFLES ECONOMIC TEAM
This is the same Fed that already fails at one of its two primary missions — that of keeping inflation in check. Yet Bernstein has a record of advocating highly inflationary policies such as the spending binges of the Biden administration, all while ludicrously predicting that resulting inflation would be only “transitory.” Instead, the policies he pushed caused inflation to rise to, and remain at, the highest levels in 40 years.
The Fed’s other responsibility is “maximum employment.” And Bernstein, in his own words, wants the Fed to “target” growth in the rate of black unemployment even at the expense of “the overall unemployment rate.” He has advocated a complete rejection of current economic “models” in favor of an economics that incorporates the “anti-racist agenda” of racial agitator Ibrahim X. Kendi, who has written that “in order to be truly anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” His essays offer support for racial “reparations,” and they link approvingly to articles by the faux historian Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The head of the Council of Economic Advisers in a prosperous capitalist nation shouldn’t be someone who wants to dismantle capitalism.
Meanwhile, Bernstein has called for “significant tax hikes” to fund two of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) favorite pipe dreams but wrote that “we should not kid ourselves into thinking, however, that we can pay for Medicare for All and a jobs guarantee solely by taxing the rich.” In other words, major tax hikes even on middle-income earners.
On energy, Bernstein wrote in October 2019 that “fossil fuels are severely underpriced.” This explains why, when President Joe Biden essentially adopted the energy policies Bernstein pushed, energy prices rose dramatically nationwide. And in his committee hearing, Bernstein refused to answer five separate times when asked if he advised Biden to cancel the Keystone pipeline, a cancellation that caused higher energy prices and eliminated at least 10,000 jobs. As noted by Tester’s Republican colleague from Montana, Sen. Steven Daines, the pipeline was supposed to traverse Montana and create $80 million of revenues annually for the state.
Those are just a few lowlights of Bernstein’s radical record. A president certainly should have the economic advisers he wishes, but the Council of Economic Advisers is a statutory position that traditionally has been filled with someone with economic bona fides apart from ideological advocacy. Bernstein does not even have a degree in economics. His three academic degrees are in fine arts, social work, and social welfare. That lack of a formal degree shouldn’t make him ineligible for one of the three positions on the Council of Economic Advisers, but it suggests he at least shouldn’t be its Senate-confirmed chairman.
With his anti-energy, high-tax, inflationary, race-obsessed, anti-capitalist policies, Jared Bernstein should not chair such an important council. Any Democrat who votes for him will forfeit all pretense of moderation, much less reasonable political centrism.