In brief: Economic aide to step down

Washington – President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, will step down as director of the National Economic Council after the November elections and return to a teaching post at Harvard University, the White House announced Tuesday.

It was unclear whether Summers, 55, volunteered to leave his post or whether he was asked to go. Obama’s entire economic team has drawn fire from congressional Republicans – and some Democrats – who accuse the White House of pursuing misguided economic policies that ran up record deficits without creating jobs or significantly improving the economy.

Many prominent economists have rebutted that view, arguing that Obama’s $814 billion stimulus package prevented last year’s recession from becoming the nation’s first depression since the 1930s.

Miller admits he got subsidies

Juneau, Alaska – Alaska Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, who believes the federal government is on the brink of bankruptcy and has called for an end to the “welfare state,” received federal farm subsidies for land that the fiscal conservative owned in Kansas in the 1990s.

The acknowledgment by the Miller campaign that he accepted farm subsidies follows a story by the Alaska Dispatch, which discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request that he got $7,235 in subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1991-’97.

It drew a sharp response from critics, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which headlined a news release: “Extremist Joe Miller also a hypocrite.”