Kevin Hassett

American Enterprise Institute

Hassett joined AEI as a resident scholar in 1997. He worked on tax policy, fiscal policy, energy issues, and investing in the stock market. He collaborated with R. Glenn Hubbard on work on the budget surplus, income inequality, and tax reform. Hassett published papers and articles on capital taxation, the consistency of tax policy, returns on energy conservation investments, corporate taxation, telecommunications competition, the effects of taxation on wages, dividend taxation, and carbon taxes.^[6]

In 2003, Hassett was named director of economic policy studies at AEI. During his tenure at AEI, he became an increasingly prolific popular writer, penning articles in major newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He writes a monthly column for National Review and, since 2005, a weekly column for Bloomberg.^[7]

Dow 36,000

Hassett is coauthor with James K. Glassman of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. It was published in 1999 before the dot-com bubble burst. The book's title was based on a calculation that, in the absence of the equity premium, stock prices would be approximately four times as high as they actually were. In its introduction, Glassman and Hassett wrote that the book "will convince you of the single most important fact about stocks at the dawn of the twenty-first century: They are cheap... If you are worried about missing the market's big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones industrial average."^[8] The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,273.00 on the day of the book's publication on October 1, 1999,^[9] peaked at 11,722.98 105 days later,^[10] then declined 37.8% through October 9, 2002.^[11]

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argued on his faculty website that the book contained basic arithmetic errors and was "a very silly book" but regarded Hassett's role as co-author as a "youthful indiscretion."^[12] Statistician and blogger Nate Silver described the book as "charlatanic" and suggested on empirical grounds that the authors had failed to notice that at the time of writing stock prices were "as overvalued as at literally any time in American history".^[13]

Views on immigration

According to The New York Times, Hassett's nomination by Trump to lead the Council of Economic Advisers was met with opposition by anti-immigrant Trump supporters such as Breitbart, American Renaissance, Infowars, the Center for Immigration Studies and "leaders of the white nationalist 'alt-right' movement".^[14] Hassett—"like most economists...believes that immigration spurs economic growth." Prior to Hassett's nomination, President Trump "broke with recent tradition and removed the council’s chairman from a cabinet-level position."^[14]

Chairman of White House Council of Economic Advisors

On September 5, 2018, Hassett released new analysis indicating that real wage growth under Trump was higher than reported, despite figures indicating that wage growth had not picked up.^[15]

On September 13, 2018, on an official visit to Ireland, when questioned if the U.S. considered Ireland as a tax haven, said that: "It’s not Ireland’s fault US tax law was written by someone on acid". Hassett had labelled Ireland as a tax haven in several interviews in August-December 2017, when advocating for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ("TCJA").^[16]