Greenspan Speaks

The nation’s economic God; the Republic’s financial savior has spoken. In what is becoming an unseemly race to distance themselves from the failed Bush Presidency, revelations about the Bush presidency continue to emerge from formerly staunch Republicans who were intimately involved. Following are some excerpts from Alan Greenspan’s soon to be published book, in which, according to the NY Times, he describes Bill Clinton as a sponge for economic data who maintained, “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth. Even though I clearly was a Republican, I had to admit [Clinton] was an extraordinarily effective president.”

Greenspan says Republican leaders in Congress made a grievous error by spending whatever it took to ensure a permanent Republican majority.

I indulged in a bit of fantasy, envisioning this as the government that might have existed had Gerald Ford garnered the extra one percent of the vote he’d needed to edge past Jimmy Carter. I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets.

[Instead] I was soon to see my old friends veer off in unexpected directions.

My friend [he writes of John O’Neill] soon found himself to be the odd man out; much to my disappointment, economic policymaking in the Bush administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff.

I’m just very disappointed. Smaller government, lower spending, lower taxes, less regulation — they had the resources to do it, they had the knowledge to do it, they had the political majorities to do it. And they didn’t. In the end, political control trumped policy, and they achieved neither political control nor policy. The Republicans in Congress lost their way. They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.

Well, remember that their economic policy, largely, was to take the proposals made during the campaign when there was a prospective very large surplus, and that those policies continued in place irrespective of what was happening to the surplus. It was wrong. It turned out that Conrad and Rubin were right.