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Session 4: Economic Policy Debate
Join us for the third debate between the economic advisers of the top presidential candidates hosted by NABE during this election season.
Speaker Materials
Speakers
Kenneth D. Simonson
Associated General Contractors of America
Ken Simonson joined AGC of America on September 10, 2001. Ever since Day Two he has been provided insight into what was happening to the economy and what it implied for construction and related industries.
Ken’s weekly one-page email newsletter for AGC, The Data DIGest, provides 6000 readers with the latest economic news relevant to construction. He also sends out a variety of state-specific and tax news. He is interviewed and quoted almost daily by local and national media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, he has written eight booklets explaining tax provisions in plain English, and he contributes frequently to a variety of business and professional publications and conferences, including columns for Fleet Owner, a trucking magazine, and The Electrical Distributor.
Ken has 30 years of experience analyzing, advocating and communicating about economic and tax issues. Before joining AGC, he was senior economic advisor in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and 13 years. Earlier, he was vice president and chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. He also worked with the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and an economic consulting firm.
Ken is a board member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and author of “Digging into Construction Data,” published in NABE’s journal, Business Economics. Since 1982, he has co-chaired the Tax Economists Forum, a professional meeting group he co-founded for leading researchers and policy makers among tax economists. He is vice president of Community Tax Aid, an organization that prepares returns for free for low-income taxpayers. He was one of the principal subjects of The Lobbyists, a bestseller by Jeffrey Birnbaum, now a writer for the Washington Post.
Ken has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, an MA in economics from Northwestern University, and he has taken advanced graduate economics courses at the Universite de Paris, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
Steve Liesman
CNBC
As CNBC’s Senior Economics Reporter, Steve Liesman reports on all aspects of the economy including the Federal Reserve Bank and major economic indicators. He appears on "Squawk Box" (M-F, 6-9 a.m. ET), as well as other CNBC programs throughout the Business Day. Liesman joined CNBC from The Wall Street Journal where he served as a senior economics reporter covering monetary policy, international economics, academic research and productivity. At the Journal, Liesman previously worked as an energy reporter and, from 1996-98, as the Journal’s Moscow bureau chief. He was a member of the reporting team recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for stories chronicling the crash of the Russian financial markets. Prior to joining the Journal in 1994, Liesman was the business editor for The Moscow Times, where, as the founding business editor for the country’s first English language daily newspaper, he helped create the publication’s stock index, which was the country’s first. Liesman has also worked as a business reporter for both the St. Petersburg Times in St. Petersburg, Fl., and The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fl. Liesman holds a Masters of Science from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in English from the State University of New York, Buffalo.
Judy Woodruff
The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff has covered politics and other news for more than three decades at CNN, NBC and PBS. Most recently, she signed on as a senior correspondent and political editor for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
In early 2007, Woodruff concluded initial reporting and production, along with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, on Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard. Generation Next is a project that interviewed American young people and reported on their views, and included an hour-long documentary aired on many PBS stations in January, 2007, a series of reports on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, reports on NPR and in USA Today, and partnerships with Yahoo! and Film Your Issue. A second hour-long Generation Next documentary aired on PBS stations on September 5, 2007.
For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, anchoring the weekday political program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and from 1984-1990, she anchored PBS' award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
At NBC News, Woodruff served as White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC's Today Show Chief Washington correspondent.
Gary Gensler
Representative for the Obama Campaign
Gary Gensler was Undersecretary of the Treasury (1999-2001) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1997-1999) in the United States.
Gary Gensler spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, making partner when he was 30, becoming head of the company's fixed income and currency trading operation in Tokyo by the mid-'90s, and eventually the company's co-head of finance.
As the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Gensler found himself in the position of overseeing policies in the areas of U.S. financial markets, debt management, financial services, and community development.
Subsequent to his time at the Treasury he acted as a Senior Advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, one of the authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to bring greater oversight to the accounting industry and reform of corporate governance.
Gensler is the co-author of a book (with Greg Baer), The Great Mutual Fund Trap. The thrust of the book is that active trading and investing is an inefficient strategy for individual investors, and that individuals should stick with index and exchange traded funds.
Coincidentally, Gensler has a twin brother Robert Gensler who runs an actively-managed fund for T. Rowe Price. Gensler also has three daughters, Anna 17, Lee 16, and Isabel 11. Mr. Gensler serves on the board of for-profit university Strayer Education, Inc. He also was senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Kevin Hassett
American Enterprise Institute
Kevin Hassett directs economic policy studies at AEI. His research interests include tax policy, the U.S. economy, the stock market, and investments. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and the chief economic adviser to Senator McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries. He currently serves as a senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. He has also served as a policy consultant to the Treasury Department during the former Bush and Clinton administrations.
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