Remember all those speeches he made supporting the Bush economic policies and Bush’s tax cuts? Well, now that Bush is the most unpopular President in a generation, and Greenspan is no longer head of the Federal Reserve, he’s finally willing to bash Bush for his reckless and dangerous “tax cut and spend” policies. Too little, and much too late:
Alan Greenspan, who served as Federal Reserve chairman for 18 years and was the leading Republican economist for the past three decades, levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book, arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint. […]
Greenspan, who had an eight-year alliance with Clinton and Democratic Treasury secretaries in the 1990s, praises Clinton’s mind and his tough anti-deficit policies, calling the former president’s 1993 economic plan “an act of political courage.”
But he expresses deep disappointment with Bush. “My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” Greenspan writes. “Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency. . . . To my mind, Bush’s collaborate-don’t-confront approach was a major mistake.”
Greenspan accuses the Republicans who presided over the party’s majority in the House until last year of being too eager to tolerate excessive federal spending in exchange for political opportunity. […]
Greenspan, 81, indirectly criticizes his friend and colleague from the Ford administration, Vice President Cheney. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill has quoted Cheney as once saying, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
Greenspan says, ” ‘Deficits don’t matter,’ to my chagrin became part of the Republicans’ rhetoric.”
He argues that “deficits must matter” and that uncontrolled government spending and borrowing can produce high inflation “and economic devastation.”
What a wanker.