Rand Paul Calls For Kreuger To Step Down Before He Even Starts As Head Of The CEA

Rand Paul has issued the following statement on President Obama's nomination of Alan Kreuger to head the Council of Economic Advisers:

Alan Krueger is nothing more than an extreme government interventionist, cut from the same cloth as those who have failed to correctly predict, diagnose, and manage our economic problem. During his tenure at the Treasury Department, Alan Krueger helped design the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program and even supported a European style value-added tax that would raise prices on American families.

This repetition of bad economic decisions by the President and his advisers could be described as the epitome of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. Hasn’t the President realized we don’t need more big-government Keynesians in Washington saddling the American taxpayer with trillions in debt? The President’s economic policies have been an abysmal failure. His economic advisers have helped lead to these failures.

I have called for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to resign, and I am now calling on Alan Krueger to step down before he even begins his new role, before any more damage can be done to the American economy by this Administration.

Bizarrely, Kreuger has argued, along with David Card, that increases in the minimum wage do not increase unemployment among teenagers and other unskilled workers.

Aside from the entire methodological question of whether empirical studies can be used in the social sciences to discover economic theory (See: The Counter Revolution of Science), the Kreuger-Card study was extremely sloppy.
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