I’ve actually come to feel sorry for Allan Hubbard. After earning an MBA and a JD from Harvard, in addition to successful business career, the poor guy is now stuck as the president’s top economic advisor and the director of Bush’s National Economic Council. It hasn’t been pretty.
For example, there’s Hubbard a month ago:
The top White House economic adviser rejected as “absolutely a non-starter” bipartisan proposals that the administration put aside its drive to create individual investment accounts in Social Security and focus first on extending the system’s solvency.
Allan Hubbard, in an interview Wednesday with USA Today, also dismissed a Democratic proposal that investment accounts be created to supplement Social Security, not as part of the system.
“President Bush’s No. 1 goal is passing legislation that permanently solves the solvency problem, and ‘add-on’ accounts do not deal with the solvency problem,” Hubbard said in his first on-the-record interview since he became head of the National Economic Council in January.
And then there’s Hubbard this week:
The top White House economic adviser said Thursday that President Bush was willing to consider making a major shift in his Social Security proposal: creating individual investment accounts that would be an “add-on” to the retirement system, not a part of it financed by diverting payroll taxes.
“We haven’t ruled it out, we haven’t ruled it in, but we’re certainly willing to discuss it,” Allan Hubbard, head of the National Economic Council, said at a breakfast with reporters.
It’s probably not entirely Hubbard’s fault — he’s just going out and saying what the White House tells him to say — but it’s hard not to pity someone who’s made to look like a fool by the president.
And, of course, it’s just the latest sign that Bush’s Social Security scheme is still — let’s all say it together — in disarray.