Who is Peter Orszag?

Rush metioned Peter Orszag today.

We didn't get to it yesterday, but Peter Orszag, the first director of Office of Management and Budget had a column in the New York Times in which he just ran for the hills from Obama on extending the Bush tax cuts. He's in favor of extending them for two years for everybody, and Obama was asked about it -- or Gibbs was asked about it. We have the sound bites coming up. The White House is clearly on the defensive here. He threw Obama overboard, threw Obama under the bus. Now, Orszag was the guy credited by Harry Reid as being the man responsible for finally putting together the budget numbers of Obamacare that made it all work out. He's gone. He's out of there.

From Wikipedia:
Peter Richard Orszag (born December 16, 1968) is an American economist who is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a contributing columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page. Until July 30, he was the 37th Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama.

Biography
Orszag grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy with high honors (1987), he earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991, and a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics. He was a Marshall Scholar 1991–1992, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[3] He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.

Economists Alan Blinder (who taught him at Princeton) and Joseph Stiglitz were his mentors early in life, and later Robert Rubin.

He currently lives in Washington, D.C. He runs marathons and enjoys country music.

He is divorced from Cameron Kennedy, with whom he had two children. He also has a daughter born in 2009 with an ex-girlfriend, a Greek shipping heiress. After that relationship ended, he met his fiancee ABC Weekend Good Morning America co-host Bianna Golodryga, with their wedding scheduled to be held in September.

Career
Orszag was a senior fellow and Deputy Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he directed The Hamilton Project and (in conjunction with Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute) the Pew Charitable Trust's Retirement Security Project.

He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration. He also formed a consulting group called Sebago Associates, which merged into Competition Policy Associates and was bought by FTI Consulting Inc. He was a consultant for McKinsey & Company on an HMO project in San Francisco, California.

He co-authored a paper titled "Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-Based Capital Standard" with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in 2002 in which they inferred that "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero."

However, they did correctly note there that "the risk-based capital standard, while based on a hypothetical economic shock significantly more severe than anything that the economy has actually experienced over the past forty years, may fail to reflect the probability of another Great Depression-like scenario."

Orszag was director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2007 to November 2008. During his tenure, he repeatedly drew attention to the role rising health care expenditures are likely to play in the government's long-term fiscal problems—and, by extension, the nation's long-term economic problems. "I have not viewed CBO's job as just to passively evaluate what Congress proposes, but rather to be an analytical resource. And part of that is to highlight things that are true and that people may not want to hear, including that we need to address health-care costs." During his time at the CBO, he added 20 full-time health analysts (bringing the total number to 50), thereby strengthening the CBO's analytical capabilities and preparing Congress for health-care reform.

Office of Management and Budget
Peter Orszag with President Obama in the Oval OfficeOn November 25, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced that Orszag would be his nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the White House responsible for crafting the federal budget and overseeing the effectiveness of federal programs.

Orszag, in a November 2009 speech in New York, said that deficits, expected to add $9 trillion to the current national debt of $12 trillion over the next decade, are "serious and ultimately unsustainable." He said that deficit spending was necessary to help boost the economy when unemployment is hovering around 10 percent. But he said that red ink must be stopped as the economy recovers. During a recovery, private investment will again pick up and compete with the federal government for capital.

In June 2010 the White House wants non-security federal agencies to list wasteful programs and produce budgets for fiscal year 2012 that cut spending by 5 percent. “It’s the beginning of the process, not the end,” he said. Orszag has stressed that the search for more spending reductions would focus on under-performing programs and that some agencies could see increases in spending. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Budget Committee Republican, said he’s “hopeful” federal agencies will heed Orszag’s call to cut spending but added that the proposed reforms didn’t go far enough. “I welcome any and all efforts that recognize the urgent need to get Washington’s fiscal house in order," Ryan said in a statement.

In July 2010 Dr Orszag said that “The problem now is weak growth and high unemployment rather than outright economic collapse,”. Still, the deficit would be equivalent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest level since World War II. The Office of Management and Budget’s mid-session review, forecast a smaller deficit and stronger economic growth than the administration’s initial budget release. The deficit forecast in 2011 increased to $1.42 trillion, up from the $1.27 estimate in February. For 2012, the deficit estimate rose to $922 billion, up from $828 billion in the previous report. The annual budget shortfall would bottom out in 2017 at $721 billion, or 3.4 percent of GDP, and begin rising again in following years.