Economic Policy

Hobart RowenPost columnistHobart Rowen, a Washington Post columnist who wrote about business and the nation's economic policy for five decades, died of cancer yesterday. He was 76."Bart taught a generation of business journalists here and around the country how to cover economic policy in a more sophisticated way," said David Ignatius, the Post's assistant managing editor for business.A passionate advocate of free trade, Mr. Rowen emphasized that the United States was part of a global economy, and his columns pushed financial reporters and government leaders to look at the larger picture.

The centrist, pro-business orientation of White House economic policy should remain intact with the nomination of Robert E. Rubin, director of the National Economic Council, to succeed Lloyd Bentsen as secretary of the Treasury.Since the outset of the Clinton administration, these two have been a tight twosome in resisting far-out liberal proposals of the president's so-called political advisers. If they faltered on one major occasion, it was because they could not prevail against Hillary Rodham's Clinton's insistence on health care reforms that even she now admits smacked too much of "big government."

Despite the creation of more than 4 million jobs since President Clinton took office, many of them for college graduates, the wages of men with bachelor's degrees have continued to deteriorate, a study by a Washington research organization has found. Administration officials say the findings are probably accurate.The study, by the Economic Policy Institute, is the first to find that the hourly wages of the college-educated lost ground to inflation even after the nation's economy began to recover from recession in the spring of 1991.

WASHINGTON -- The speaker of the House has recommended that Rep. Kweisi Mfume be elected chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, a plum that would broaden the Baltimore Democrat's congressional resume while making him the first black to control the influential panel.The Joint Economic Committee does not handle legislation, but it employs a staff of economists charged with making an annual economic report to Congress. The panel also conducts monthly hearings, at which the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils national unemployment figures, and serves as a kind of economic think tank for Congress.

Robert E. Rubin, chairman of the National Economic Council, was much too quick in denying that Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has been "a senior adviser, almost a teacher to [President] Clinton" -- a description appearing in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. In asserting that the president "relates to Alan Greenspan the way he relates to" other economic policy advisers, Mr. Rubin turned the usual White House spin into quite a stretch.The fact is that no president relates to the Fed chairman of the moment as though he were just another adviser.

THE administration and its pro-NAFTA allies have been predicting a major foreign policy disaster if NAFTA is voted down. This is foolish in two respects. First, it is unconvincing as a strategy for winning support. And second, the sponsors risk setting up a self-fulfilling prophesy of exaggerated humiliation should NAFTA lose.Here is a sampler of recent pro-NAFTA hyperbole:The New Republic for Oct. 11 included four pro-NAFTA pieces, opening with an overheated editorial on the magazine's cover: "As much as any event since the communist collapse, the vote on NAFTA could define America's post-Cold War identity.

Atlanta -- The folks who like their heroes neat -- or for that matter, their villains -- will be confounded by the new Nelson Mandela. Wasn't Mandela the last pure revolutionary? Or, alternatively, the last pure Communist devil?Then who was this man who stood last week before the United Nations and, his revolution far from complete and looking more like an evolution anyway, called for ending economic sanctions against South Africa?It was, of course, the Nelson Mandela who hopes soon to lead South Africa, and who, of all the possible outcomes before him, wants least to become the leader of a nation simultaneously in political upheaval and economic collapse.

London. -- The underlying issue is moral in today's debate over economic policy and tariff reductions. It is a moral decision to treat wage levels and employment as neutral factors in the functioning of the marketplace. It is equally a moral decision when a government intervenes in the market to protect wages or create jobs.The moral aspect of economic policy choice is gaining increased attention. It was a subject of discussion in the economic section of the recent annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

WASHINGTON -- Two widely followed consumer confidence polls taken in the first half of August show Americans are even more discouraged about the economy and their own financial situations than they were before the Aug. 6 vote on President Clinton's budget.This suggests that most consumers, already as depressed about economic prospects as they were when George Bush was president, have not bought the Clinton administration's assurances that its plan will help get the economy moving and benefit all but the richest Americans.

"You here for the speeches or the breakfast?" County Councilman Darrel Drown asked.He was not altogether kidding. He knew his talk to the Howard County chapter of the Homebuilders Association would be as rousing a political speech as he has given in some time.Mr. Drown, R-2nd, had the last word in a five-politician lineup that included County Executive Charles I. Ecker; council chair Shane Pendergrass, D-1st; and council members Paul R. Farragut, D-4th, and Charles C. Feaga, R-5th. Councilman C. Vernon Gray, D-3rd, was in Japan.