Critics say Krueger is merely another Ivy League Keynesian with no real world experience. Others claim he's just another socialist attempting to duplicate the sinking European socialist economy, and he will further damage the Obama administration and the United States.
President Barack Obama on Monday morning in a brief press announcement in the White House's Rose Garden, with Alan B. Krueger standing beside him, introduced nominee Krueger as a top member of the Council of Economic Advisors.
“I’m very pleased to nominate Alan Krueger to chair the Council of Economic Advisers,” Obama said.
“In the first two years of this administration, as we were dealing with the effects of a complex and fast-moving financial crisis -- a crisis that threatened a second Great Depression -- Alan’s counsel as chief economist at the Treasury Department proved invaluable,” said Obama.
Critics of Krueger called him a "Clinton White House retread" since he worked as Chief Economist for President Bill Clinton's Labor Department in 1994-1995. He also worked for Timothy Geithner at the Treasury Department in 2009-2010 before returning to academia.
He wholeheartedly supports “a future consumption tax to fix today’s economy,” as well as a higher minimum wage, which he claims does not depress employment.
During his time in Washington, Krueger advocated a number of big-ticket, government programs, including the HIRE Act, the Small Business Lending Fund, Build America Bonds and the Car Allowance Rebate System, or “Cash for Clunkers.”
As does his boss President Obama, Krueger believes that government is able to create a robust economy, in spite of the fact he and all the President's men have failed to stop the economy from hemorrhaging and turn the economic indicators around including the high unemployment numbers.
Reiterating his promise to reveal “a series of steps that Congress can take immediately to put more money in the pockets of working families and middle-class families” in September, President Obama called on lawmakers in both houses of Congress, “to make it easier for small businesses to hire people, to put construction crews to work rebuilding our nation’s roads and railways and airports, and all the other measures that can help to grow this economy.”
Addressing the lawmakers from all parties, President Obama said, “These are bipartisan ideas that ought to be the kind of proposals that everybody can get behind, no matter what your political affiliation might be.”
A White House press release regarding Krueger, states he serves as Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he has held faculty appointments in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School since 1987.
He is also the founding Director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center. As far as the political spectrum, Krueger is closer to New York Times' socialist economist/commentator Paul Krugman than he is to the venerated free-market advocate, Dr. Milton Friedman.
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