oh my!

Josh Marshall writes:

"It really is amazing that anyone takes Alan Greenspan seriously anymore. Sen. Reid was right when he called him one of Washington's biggest political hacks. Here's an article about a speech Chairman Greenspan just gave in which he said that our structural budget deficits are a far greater threat to the nation's economy than either the trade deficit or our low savings rate.

That's almost certainly so.

But without putting too fine a point on it, the deficits are his fault!

Not exclusively his fault, certainly. But by placing his seal of approval on the president's 2001 tax cut package (the primary cause of our rapidly escalating indebtedness) he probably played as a big a role as any single individual after the president himself in ensuring that those tax cuts (and those that followed them) became law. Anyone can be wrong. But the rationale he gave at that time was clearly disingenuous.

It's an elementary point. The man simply has no credibility on this issue. And even though criticism of Greenspan along these lines has become more vocal of late, he still remains close to sacrosanct in polite political debate.

Some day it will be an amazing history to tell, how this acolyte of a half-baked Russian emigre eccentric became the economic avatar of America's turn-of-the-century political class."