Educate or Die
The NY Sun has a modest summary of Alan Greenspan’s tell-all, claiming that the present Fed members are scrambling to get copies before their meeting this week. Among the tidbits that interested me most was,
“The impact that fixing our school system would have on our future levels of economic activity may not be easy to measure,” he writes, “but unless we do so and begin to reverse a quarter century of increases in income inequality, the cultural ties that bind our society could become undone. Disaffection, breakdowns of authority, even largescale violence could ensue, jeopardizing the civility on which growing economies depend.”
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September 17th, 2007 @ 6:48 am
Krugman weighs in on Greenspan in his Monday column.
“Well, I’m sorry, but [Krugman's] criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.
Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, and that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. There were, indeed, rumors at the time — which Mr. Greenspan now says were true — that the Fed chairman was upset about the response to his initial statement.
But the fact is that if Mr. Greenspan wasn’t intending to lend crucial support to the Bush tax cuts, he had ample opportunity to set the record straight when it could have made a difference.
His first big chance to clarify himself came a few weeks after that initial testimony, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.
… In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan’s moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea.
And like enthusiastic war supporters who have started describing themselves as war critics now that the Iraq venture has gone wrong, Mr. Greenspan has started portraying himself as a critic of administration fiscal irresponsibility now that President Bush has become deeply unpopular and Democrats control Congress.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/opinion/17krugman.html