Word: taxingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sure, there are few times in our congressmen?s lives that they look as stupefied as when Alan Greenspan comes to visit them on Capitol Hill. But as tax-cut-hungry Republicans in the House and Senate blinked their way through the Fed chairman?s testimony on the last two Wednesdays ?- testimony in which Greenspan repeatedly shot down the idea of massive tax cuts -- one sensed that another question besides "huh?" was nagging at them this time. Namely, wasn?t this guy supposed to be a Republican...
...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 presidency has charted a course...
...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...
...pivotal choice: whether to move forward with a sound strategy that led us to this point, or to return to the reckless policies that threw our nation into stagnation and economic decline," boomed the president on Thursday. That last part, of course, is a canard. The last big tax cut was the Reagan mammoth of 1981, and though it did plunge the budget into $200 billion deficits, it also pulled the economy out of stagnation and economic decline, and laid the foundation for the '90s boom that today is paying those deficits...
...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...