Top Romney Economic Adviser Takes Ideas Of Donor Who Wants More Income Inequality ‘Seriously’ [View all]

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Source: ThinkProgress

Edward Conard, a top donor to the super PAC backing Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, is writing a book that calls for more income inequality in the United States. Conard’s book, “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You Know About The Economy Is Wrong,” takes various views that “aren’t shared by many analysts” or economists, the New York Times’ Adam Davidson notes.

But one of the economists that does, at least in part, share Conard’s views is working for the Romney campaign. Glenn Hubbard, an economist and top Romney economic adviser, takes Conard’s broad economic ideas “seriously,” the Times reports:

Glenn Hubbard, a prominent economist and one of Romney’s chief economic advisers, takes his ideas seriously. “He doesn’t have the blinders of a model-based view of the world, which is an advantage and a disadvantage,” Hubbard told me.

That Hubbard takes Conard’s economic ideas seriously shouldn’t be surprising. Throughout the campaign, Romney has proposed many of the same failed economic policies this type of worldview promotes, focusing on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that he insists will boost growth for the middle and lower classes, even if they have failed to do so before.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/05/02/475148/top-romney-economic-adviser-takes-ideas-of-donor-who-wants-emmoreem-income-inequality-seriously/

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Source: ThinkProgress

Top Romney Donor Pens Book Arguing We Need More Income Inequality

Income inequality in the United States has skyrocketed over the last several decades and especially since the Great Recession, so much so that it is now worse than in Ivory Coast and Pakistan. It may even be worse than it was in Ancient Rome, a society built on slave labor.

That income inequality is crushing the middle class and its political power. But don’t tell that to Edward Conard, a top donor to presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney who gained notoriety during the campaign as a million-dollar mystery donor who set up a shell company to shield his identity. Conard, a former director at the Romney-founded Bain Capital, is working on a new book in which he argues that income inequality is a good thing, and what the U.S. really needs is more of it, the New York Times’ Adam Davidson reports:

Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/05/01/474673/romney-donor-income-inequality/