Path to Power
Raised in New York City, Furman had a knack for juggling — literally. He would juggle apples, eggs, bowling balls, torches and knives on the streets of New York City, earning cash from onlookers.
But he didn’t actually need the money. He lived a privileged childhood, going to the private Dalton School on the Upper East Side. His father, Jay Furman, owns a shopping-center development firm and also works as an attorney. The elder Furman sits on the board of New York University, and has a building named after him on the campus called Furman Hall, which he earned after giving more than $20 million to the school. Gail Furman, Jason’s mother, is a well-respected child psychologist.
That did not stop the younger Furman from trying to make a name for himself. After high-school, he earned three degrees at Harvard University, starting with a bachelor’s in social studies, before moving on to earn a master’s in government and a PhD in economics.
While he worked towards his doctorate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia professor and Nobel Prize winning economist, hired Furman to work with him for one year on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Stiglitz was the Council’s chairman at the time.
“’In a group of people who were very good, he turned out to be one of the best,’ the Columbia professor said. ‘People in economic policy often grasp the big picture but the details of modeling statistics is not their strength. Jason is unusual in being able to do both of those.’"
Stiglitz hired Furman to work at the World Bank the next year, but after a short stint, Furman returned to Harvard. But he didn’t stay long in Cambridge, before returning to the White House to work the last couple years of Clinton’s administration on the president’s economic team, this time under Gene Sperling.
When
Al Gore ran for president in 2000, Furman became a senior economic adviser. Gore’s campaign started a tough stretch of losses for the Democrats and for Furman.
After Gore’s loss, Furman returned to Harvard to finish his PhD. “It was a hard transition from the fast-paced life and very practical life of Washington," Furman said. "It definitely took longer to get back into the swing of it."
Once Furman finally earned his doctorate in 2003, he returned to politics to advise Gen. Wesley Clark’s ill-fated attempt to become the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Soon after Sen.
John Kerry (D-Mass.) won the Democratic nomination, he asked Furman to join his team.
The Issues
As a director of Rubin’s Brookings Institution-based Hamilton Project, Furman is in the centrist economic camp that basically believes in free trade and lower deficits.
In an April 2008 article for Slate.com, Furman says realistic spending goals must be set that don’t increase the Bush administration fiscal legacy of a $4 trillion deficit. Although universal health care, for instance, should be a priority in the
Obama administration, it should not be implemented by growing the deficit.
He also advocated working with the other party to solve fiscal problems.
“Any one party or branch of government has it within its power to stop the deficit from worsening. But it is hard to imagine a feasible or desirable process to actually reduce the deficit that does not involve both parties and both branches of government,” Furman wrote in Slate.
Furthermore, letting the 2001 Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 won’t be enough, contended Furman, to right the fiscal ship. Furman advocates other “more economically efficient” tax policy changes such as implementing a carbon tax, increasing cigarette taxes and “reforming the deductibility of [home] the mortgage interest,” he wrote, a step that would prove very controversial.
Social Security
Furman is known for helping to defeat President George W. Bush’s push for privatizing a portion of Social Security funds.
A continual topic of debate in the 2004 election was the future of Social Security. Furman worked extensively on the subject, arguing against privatization. Furman argued that the deficit needed to be reigned in before Social Security could be altered in any way.
"’Bringing the deficit under control would improve the fiscal situation and put you in a better situation regarding Social Security,’ Furman said.”
In fact, after
Kerry lost the 2004 race, Furman continued to fight President George W. Bush’s plan to allow for some Social Security privatization. He called Bush’s plan "the usual set of exaggerating the crisis, and implying there is a free lunch solution and ignoring the issue of how the accounts are financed."
Wal-Mart Controversy
The same year Furman fought against Bush’s Social Security initiative, he also praised Wal-Mart in a report that liberals still fiercely decry. Furman defended the discount super-store, calling it a “progressive success story” by disputing the notion that its business model hurt the wages of retail workers in the industry.
In a report, Furman basically estimated that Wal-Mart’s price reductions saved Americans nearly $263 billion, while disputing the argument that Wal-Mart hurts retail workers’ wages. Furman estimated that wage losses for retail workers had decreased by a maximum of about $5 billion a year. He concluded that society is better off as a result of Wal-Mart’s business model and said that observers should focus on attacking problems in the larger retail sector as opposed to the mega-store’s wages.
Furman downplays the angry outcry in response to his paper. “There's a zero-sum mentality among some segments of the left," he said. “If someone is doing well, then someone else must be doing poorly."
But when
Obama tapped Furman to join his economic team, that ‘zero-sum mentality’ comment caused an immediate backlash from one of the Democratic Party’s biggest power-players: AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.
'''For years we've expressed strong concerns about corporate influence on the Democratic Party,’ Sweeney commented in a statement implicitly critical of the symbolism of the appointment, regardless of Mr. Furman's economic skills,” the New York Times reported.
This was Furman’s response: “I am not here to tell Senator
Obama what to think about Wal-Mart,” he said, “but to help him implement his ideas, and they are ideas I share, like universal health insurance, progressive taxation and not privatizing Social Security.''
The Network
Furman’s mentor was Stiglitz, a former chairman of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Nobel Prize winning economics professor. He worked closely with Sperling, who was another Clinton economic council chair.
Furman was hired by Rubin to work for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
After joining Obama’s team, Furman worked closely with University of Chicago Graduate School of Business professor, Austan Goolsbee. Also on the economic team were Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker, former Treasury secretary and Fed Chairman, respectively.
Furman’s brother served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter and Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
Campaign Contributions
Furman has contributed $9,840 to political campaigns since 1999. Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.) has received $5,100 of the total. Furman gave Judith Feder (D) $2,500 in her two failed attempts at winning the 10th district of Virginia. Gen. Clark accepted $2,000 from Furman during his run in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. The only other candidate receiving funds was Gore in during his 2000 presidential run.
