Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bill Clinton has made triangulation history with his six-year sidle into the heart of what was once a Republican fiscal conservatism, but it was Mr. Greenspan, with arms akimbo and foot a-tapping, who was waiting for the president when he got there. In 1992 Greenspan told Clinton in un-opaque terms that the tax-cut inauguration party Clinton was planning would immediately be met by a punitive/precautionary hike in interest rates. Clinton listened -- Greenspan, after all, had just rate-hiked George Bush right out of office (at least that?s how Bush tells it). Clinton?s economy-stupid...
...These days, Americans? trust is in the markets, and the markets? trust is in Greenspan, and so Americans trust in Alan Greenspan, more so perhaps than any official -- elected or not -- in decades. So it was too bad for Republicans when Greenspan, on successive Wednesdays, said exactly what most voters seem to privately think about an $800 billion tax cut of any shape: "Probably we would be better off holding...
...right about the "sound strategy." And Greenspan knows it, and you get the feeling that eight years ago, the GOP would have known it too. The tax cut is too damn big. It?s supposed to differentiate the Republicans from the Clintoncrats, and it certainly does. The problem is that all those years of rightward, ho! has left Clinton as the fiscal conservative (with a Reagan-appointed Fed chairman on his side) and Republicans as the fiscal profligates. The boomers already got their money in 1981; now that they?ve got leftovers, they want to squirrel some of it away...
...leadership maintains that they can do it all ?- save Social Security, save Medicare and slash taxes ?- and yet few, including moderates in their own party, seem to believe that. And Greenspan may have hit upon the reason why: this multi-trillion-dollar surplus, which materialized in the last year as if from thin air, is still just a promise -- a hunch, even -- by a bunch of Washington politicians. And it could disappear just as quickly. "Things are happening which we call technical factors, which is another way of saying we don't have a clue, and they could just...
...Greenspan, who looks like he enjoys answering politicians? oafishly loaded questions about as much as he likes tipping his hand on interest rates, did throw his party fellows a few tidbits: Even a big tax cut, properly phased in, wouldn?t spark inflation. And it certainly would be preferable to frittering it away on new spending programs. But give Big Al his druthers, and he?d rather pay down the debt. It isn?t surprising that the Fed Chairman, whose speeches are the economic equivalent of Rorshach tests, left both sides with enough soundbites to claim his support...