A former president of Harvard University and still a tenured professor there, Summers works as a commentator on Bloomberg Television and its Wall Street Week program.
Summers wrote a paper in 2019 proposing a “pragmatic approach” to raising $4 trillion in federal revenue from the rich, through higher capital gains taxes, the closure of loopholes and greater Internal Revenue Service oversight of tax returns. Biden has already proposed some of those ideas.
Summers was critical of Sanders’s and Warren’s wealth tax during the Democratic primary and has specifically called out the work of two economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who advised the two former candidates on those plans.
“For progressives to invest their energy in a proposal that the Supreme Court has better than a 50% chance of declaring unconstitutional, that has very little chance of passing through the Congress, whose revenue potential is extraordinarily in doubt—for that to be the defining element in the progressive agenda in the United States, it seems to me to potentially sacrifice an immense opportunity,” he said at a Peterson Institute for International Economics panel in October.
Progressives are also critical of his role in the Clinton administration’s push to deregulate the financial services industry. He also faces skepticism from some outside economics for comments he made 15 years ago, while serving as Harvard’s president, on women in science and engineering.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.