Could someone please explain to me why Alan Greenspan waited until he was out of office to say this:
In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.
Mr. Bush, he writes, was never willing to contain spending or veto bills that drove the country into deeper and deeper deficits, as Congress abandoned rules that required that the cost of tax cuts be offset by savings elsewhere. “The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” writes Mr. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican.”
The problem here, of course, is that Greenspan wasn't a neutral observer in all of this. And even he knows that:
Though Mr. Greenspan does not admit he made a mistake, he shows remorse about how Republicans jumped on his endorsement of the 2001 tax cuts to push through unconditional cuts without any safeguards against surprises. He recounts how Mr. Rubin and Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, begged him to hold off on an endorsement because of how it would be perceived.
“It turned out that Conrad and Rubin were right,” he acknowledges glumly. He says Republican leaders in Congress made a grievous error in spending whatever it took to ensure a permanent Republican majority.
Fair enough. Except that Greenspan then remained silent on the matter from 2001 until now. And although its certainly helpful of him to say something now, I can't help but wonder why he didn't do it sooner. No doubt the paycheck he is getting from his publisher is larger than the one he once got from the people of the United States, but still....
UPDATE: Forgot to highlight this part before I hit publish:
“I indulged in a bit of fantasy, envisioning this as the government that might have existed had Gerald Ford garnered the extra 1 percent of the vote he’d needed to edge past Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Greenspan writes in his memoir. “I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets.”
Instead, Mr. Greenspan continued, “I was soon to see my old friends veer off in unexpected directions.” He expected Mr. Bush to veto spending bills, he writes, but was told that the president believed he could control J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the Republican speaker of the House, better by signing them.
Leaving aside Greenspan's strange longing for a return to the great days of the Ford administration, I'd love to know more about Bush's explanation here. He actually thought that signing legislation gave him more power over Congress than vetoing it? Really? That's just bizarre.
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