White House: Obama will name Goolsbee to chair economic council

President Obama on Friday will announce that he is naming economic adviser Austan Goolsbee to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

A White House official confirmed that Obama will announce Goolsbee’s appointment at an East Room press conference on Friday morning.

Goolsbee replaces Christina Romer, who announced last month she was leaving the position to return to the University of California at Berkeley.

Goolsbee is a longtime Obama adviser, dating to before the 2008 campaign, and has frequently pushed the president’s policies in television interviews and public appearances. Goolsbee will take over the post at a difficult time for the administration as the economy struggles to grow and suffers under nearly double-digit unemployment rates.

Romer came under heavy criticism for predicting that last year’s roughly $800 billion fiscal stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. The rate is now 9.6 percent, after topping 10 percent earlier this year.

The administration is also locked in a difficult debate with Republicans and some Democrats over the future of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted by former President George W. Bush.

Obama wants to extend the tax cuts for those making less than $200,000 a year and for families making less than $250,000. But he wants to allow the upper-income tax cuts to expire.

Republicans, some Democrats and private economists are warning that a tax hike on the wealthy would hurt the economic recovery.

Goolsbee argued this week that extending the tax cuts for the wealthy, estimated to cost $700 billion, would not help stimulate the economy.

“We cannot afford $700 billion for that purpose,” Goolsbee said on CNN. “And every objective analyst that has looked at it has emphasized that tax cuts for millionaires have the lowest bang for the buck of any measures that we could possibly take and we shouldn’t extend those.”