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**NOVEMBER 18, 2020**

Kuttner on TAP

Biden's Mr. Austerity: Bruce Reed

****

Virtually all of the Biden campaign's senior staff has been named to
White House jobs, save one. That would be Bruce Reed, the longtime head
of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, a former chief of
staff to the vice president from 2011 to 2013, and a notable budget
hawk.

Maybe Team Biden is having second thoughts about Reed? Let's hope so.

In 2010, Reed served as executive director of the Bowles-Simpson
Commission, one of Barack Obama's worst blunders. The commission was
created in order to put the federal budget on an automatic pilot to
deficit reduction, long before the economy was in post-collapse
recovery.

The premature pivot to austerity was a major factor in the Democrats'
record-breaking loss of 63 House seats in the November 2010 midterm
election. As executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, Reed
was not only an austerity advocate himself. He brought on unpaid
staffers from leading austerity organizations funded by Pete Peterson.

When Reed was named to a senior job in the Biden campaign last January,
the Peterson-funded Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group
bent on cutting Social Security, cheered. "We can't think of a better
person for the job," CRFB said in a statement.

One of Biden's first and most important decisions will be whether to
give recovery priority over deficit reduction. If ever there was a time
for large-scale, deficit-financed public investments, it is now. But the
undertow of conventional wisdom, bad fiscal advice, and old Washington
cronies remains potent.

We dodged a bullet when Reed was passed over for Biden chief of staff in
favor of Ron Klain. How about a nice ambassadorship for Reed, maybe to a
threadbare country that drank the austerity Kool-Aid?

If Biden has his head screwed on, he'll keep this guy far away from
White House policymaking.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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