South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Brad DeLong argues that Erskine Bowles “flunked” his audition for the job of Treasury Secretary.

I don’t think he would be a good Treasury Secretary, because I think he failed catastrophically as co-chair of the deficit-reduction commission.
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Bowles as co-chair of the deficit-reduction commission had two missions:
1) His primary mission was to corral Republican legislative support for a commission proposal that could serve as a long-run budget-balancing taxes-and-entitlement-reform bipartisan plan.
2) Failing that, his secondary mission to collect the Democratic members of the commission and rally them behind a technocratically-serious, fair, and Democratic proposal that the President could then use to negotiate a long-run budget-balancing taxes-and-entitlement-reform bipartisan plan.
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Bowles failed on both of these counts….