John McCain says
that he’s "really
never understood" economics, and that he might give responsibility
for economy to a more financially-literate vice-president. Is that realistic?
I think that maybe it is. There are certain areas where a president really has
to make the big decisions himself, and those areas center on foreign policy.
But I don’t think that fiscal policy needs a hands-on president: Bill Clinton,
for one, was never better at fiscal policy than when he sat back and let Bob
Rubin make the decisions and do most of the talking.
That said, however, Clinton is no one’s idea of an economic naif,
and you can be sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he signed on to Rubin’s
plan to, say, bail out Mexico from its tequila crisis. I suspect that in order
to make such a decision one needs to understand the issues in some depth: it
would be incredibly hard to simply sign on the dotted line because your vice-president
and treasury secretary told you to do so.
McCain does have a long – a very long – list
of economic advisors, including some pretty illustrious names: John Taylor,
Anne Krueger, Ken Rogoff, Mark Zandi. But there are 36 advisors in
all, which seems ridiculously excessive to me and seems to guarantee a cacophony
of conflicting advice. I don’t think anybody is capable of boiling down the
advice of 36 different advisors into a single coherent economic policy, and
I worry that a McCain White House would suffer from that problem, especially
if the vice-president, the treasury secretary, the chairman of the Federal Reserve,
and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors all started saying different
things.
McCain does have a man in mind who he might turn to for adjudication, however:
"I would like to have someone I’m close to that really is a good strong
economist. As long as Alan Greenspan is around I would certainly use him for
advice and counsel."
I’m sure Brad DeLong would approve.