Speaker Biographies

Friday, January 20, 2006

Joseph Antos is the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at AEI and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Prior to coming to AEI, Mr. Antos served as assistant director for health and human resources at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the division within the CBO that provides Congress with analyses of proposed changes to federal programs and policies in areas such as health, income security, education, employment, and housing. Mr. Antos was the director of the Office of Research and Demonstrations and deputy director of the Office of the Actuary at the Health Care Financing Administration. He served as deputy chief of staff and the principal deputy assistant secretary for management and budget at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Former Senator John Breaux, a leader in national politics, served as an effective and aggressive advocate for the state of Louisiana. Senator Breaux was elected to the House of Representatives in 1972 at the age of twenty-eight. Senator Breaux represented the Seventh District of Louisiana for fourteen years before being elected to fill Senator Russell Long's seat in 1986. In 1998, Senator Breaux was overwhelmingly re-elected to a third term in the U.S. Senate. In 1993, his Democratic colleagues elected him to serve as chief deputy whip, a position he held for four congressional terms through the 107th Congress. A senior member of the Finance Committee, Senator Breaux served as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy. He served on two other finance subcommittees: health care, and taxation and IRS oversight. From his position on the Finance Committee, Senator Breaux played critical roles in several recent legislative debates. He was instrumental in helping forge the compromises that led to passage of the welfare reform and health-insurance reform bills in 1996. He was also a leader in the efforts to reduce the capital gains tax and proposed significant tax relief for college education expenses. As the leader of the Centrist Coalition of Senate Democrats and Republicans, Senator Breaux sought bipartisan agreements in a number of areas, including the balanced budget, welfare reform, and health care reform. Senator Breaux was the chairman of the Special Committee on Aging. He used this position to highlight the importance of protecting and strengthening Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that are essential to the health and wellbeing of older Americans. In 1998, he was selected by White House, House, and Senate leaders to chair the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. Also in 1998, Senator Breaux co-chaired the National Commission on Retirement Policy, which produced legislation to help reform Social Security. Senator Breaux has been at the forefront of the effort to return the national Democratic Party to the center of American politics. He was a founder and past chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, succeeding Bill Clinton in 1991.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and holds the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the sixth director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). He has spent his professional career as an economist in academia and government and is on leave from Syracuse University, where he holds the post of trustee professor of economics at the Maxwell School. His previous positions at Syracuse include chairman of the Department of Economics and associate director of the Center for Policy Research. Before his positions at Syracuse University, he held academic posts at Columbia University and Princeton University. Prior to joining CBO, Mr. Holtz-Eakin served for eighteen months as chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He also served as senior staff economist for the council in 1989 and 1990. In addition, he has been a faculty research fellow and research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Economics Advisory Panel to the National Science Foundation, and a visiting scholar at AEI. At the state level, he has served as a consultant for commissions and agencies in Arizona, New York, and New Jersey. Mr. Holtz-Eakin has a broad interest in the economics of public policy. He has studied the role of federal taxes in home ownership, the contribution of inventories to the business cycle, and a wide variety of topics in state and local government finance. Recently, his research has centered around the economics of fundamental tax reform; the effects of public infrastructure on productivity; income mobility in the United States; and the role of families, capital markets, health insurance, and tax policy in the success of business ventures. Mr. Holtz-Eakin has served as editor of the National Tax Journal and has been a member of the editorial boards of a wide range of economic journals, including Economics and Politics, Small Business Economics, Journal of Sports Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Public Works Management and Policy.

R. Glenn Hubbard was named dean of Columbia Business School on July 1, 2004. A Columbia faculty member since 1988, he is also the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics. Prior to becoming dean, he was the co-director of Columbia Business School’s Entrepreneurship Program. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School as well as the University of Chicago. Professor Hubbard also held the John M. Olin Fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research, at which he remains affiliated with research programs in monetary economics, public economics, corporate finance, and industrial organization. Additionally, he is a visiting scholar at AEI and a member of the International Advisory Board of the MBA Program of Ben-Gurion University. Professor Hubbard’s research spans tax policy, monetary economics, corporate finance, and international finance. In addition to writing more than ninety scholarly articles in economics and finance, Professor Hubbard is the author of a leading textbook on money and financial markets and a co-author of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (AEI Press, 2005). His commentaries have appeared in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Nikkei and the Daily Yomiuri, as well as on television (on PBS’s Nightly Business Report) and radio (on NPR’s Marketplace). In government, Professor Hubbard served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department for Tax Policy from 1991 to 1993. He supervised administration efforts on revenue estimates, tax reform, and health policy. From February 2001 until March 2003, he was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) under President George W. Bush. His responsibilities included advising the president on economic policy, tax and budget policy, emerging market financial issues, international finance, health care, and environmental policy. While serving as CEA chairman, he also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Professor Hubbard also served on the advisory boards of several organizations, including the CBO, the Council on Competitiveness, the American Council on Capital Formation, the Economic Club of New York, the Tax Foundation, and the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse.