(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Republican economist Glenn Hubbard likes some things President Trump has done (tax cuts, deregulation) and dislikes others (trade wars), but he has little to say about Trump’s plans for the economy if he wins a second term. The reason is simple, he says: “He has no economic plan. I don’t mean that I don’t like it. It doesn’t exist.”
Hubbard was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003 and advised the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, and of Jeb Bush in 2016. He’s a professor at Columbia University and was dean of Columbia Business School from 2004 to 2019.
Hubbard says he could “imagine opportunities” for a second Trump term, such as how to fix problems with the health-care system that have been “laid bare” by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Maybe talk about fiscal reform, or trade in a way that engaged our allies,” but he hasn’t done any of that, Hubbard says.
“Anybody who says they know what Trump would do in a second term, I don’t know where they’re getting that from,” he says.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president, doesn’t have much of a plan either, according to Hubbard. “His, too, is a little odd,” he says. “I’d have thought, if I was running for president, I would have focused on recovery and then a variety of renewal, recovery issues. There’s not really much there other than nods to the Democratic plan, which is kind of a Christmas tree.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.