Alan Greenspan: Bush is wrong, Clinton had it right

[LaWood]

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

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.”

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

It was a presidency marred by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he writes, but he fondly describes his alliance with two of Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, in battling financial crises in Latin America and then Asia.

By contrast, Mr. Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy, and an administration incapable of executing policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/busin ... ref=slogin

[Dardedar]

Wow.

[LaWood]

The BBC picks up the story too:

"The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has said President George W Bush pays too little attention to financial discipline.

In a book to be published next week, Mr Greenspan says Mr Bush ignored his advice to veto "out-of-control" bills that sent the US deeper into deficit.

And Mr Bush's Republicans deserved to lose control of Congress in last year's elections, he charges. "
....

"Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences," he says of the Bush administration.

And he charges that Republicans in Congress "swapped principle for power" and "ended up with neither".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6996713.stm

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

He's right that the Republicans chose power over principal and it's quite true that they apparently no longer have any principals - but I wouldn't count them out on the power thing yet. The Congressional margin is way to thin - and the Progressives have been blaming the Dems, with that razor-thin margin and a hunger-maddened pack of Blue Dogs to contend with, for not immediately fixing everything.

It might have helped keep W from getting enough votes to steal the election (if, for example, the "spoiled" votes in AR or TN had actually been examimed and the viable ones counted, Gore would have carried his home state and probably AR as well - with either one, W could HAVE FL and still wouldn't have won) if Greenspan hadn't sold out to the neocons in 1998, which led to the dot.com bubble, without which there couldn't have been a bubble to pop in early 2000 (and to be blamed on Clinton-Gore.