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

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

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.

Romney shares Conard’s “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking” only on a broad level, Hubbard told the Times. That should be disturbing, though, given that Conard was arguing for more income inequality precisely to promote innovation and growth. Romney himself has shrugged off discussions about income inequality, saying he is “not concerned with the very poor” and that the topic should only be discussed in “quiet rooms.”