Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist during the Presidential campaign and a member of the economic team currently, will become the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, replacing Christina Romer. If Romer’s tenure on the CEA is any expectation, Goolsbee will spend his time there butting heads with Larry Summers and being stymied on getting his advice to the President.

On a series of conference calls with reporters and bloggers, Jason Furman, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, defended the series of tax breaks and infrastructure investments that make up the White House’s new jobs package as both a short-term way to boost the economy and draw contrast with a Republican platform stuck in the past, and a long-term way to create better modes for business investment in the future. But he still left nagging questions about the relative benefits of a policy which even some Democrats are way of, and which economists have found dubious in recent days.

Today’s announcement of a $200 billion dollar program to allow businesses to write off their capital expenditures up front in 2010 and 2011 at full cost (which would only cost $30 billion in the long run) hasn’t received the widest reception from the economic profession.