Oh, Alan. If only you’d had your epiphany sooner. Yes, Alan Greenspan has admitted that free market ideology is wrong, and now he’s calling for Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire. This won’t make him any friends on the GOP side, or among an entire new generation of Ayn Rand devotees:
July 15 (Bloomberg) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose endorsement of George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts helped persuade Congress to pass them, said lawmakers should allow the cuts to expire at the end of the year.
“They should follow the law and let them lapse,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” citing a need for the tax revenue to reduce the federal budget deficit.
Greenspan’s comments, to be broadcast tomorrow and over the weekend, place him in the middle of an election-year struggle over extending trillions of dollars of tax cuts enacted under Bush.President Barack Obama campaigned for election in 2008 on a promise of extending the Bush tax reductions for families earning up to $250,000 while eliminating the cuts for higher- income Americans, a position also embraced by most congressional Democrats. Republicans have pressed for continuing the cuts for higher-income families, arguing that a weak economy is no time for a tax increase.
Isn’t it funny? This Bloomberg reporter doesn’t even go through the motions of trying to figure out if those positions have any basis in reality! I suppose he thought that the fact that the highest brackets are doing quite well had nothing to do with this story. Well, God bless ‘im, at least guy he has a job, right? Good on him!
