OK, OK. He's a hack.

A hackety hacktacular hack.

Giving Greenspan the benefit of the doubt is not a smart thing to do over at Ezra's. But you know what? I followed through on the reading suggested in the smackdown(s), and am duly humbled. Yep. As much as it goes against my nature as a blogger, I have to admit that I was wayyyyy off. Alan Greenspan was not a model Fed chairman untill the Republicans came to power and *poof* out popped the cloven hooves. He was a whore for his own brand of market-worshipping conservative ideology all along. He simply played a dispassionate econ-wonk to convince Clinton that paying down the deficit was more important than social programs. What he omitted to mention was that for him, cutting taxes was more important than paying down the deficit.

[O]n the basis of dubious economics and weak history, he convinced Bill Clinton to give top priority to the elimination of the deficit, as opposed to the public investments in education, health, and infrastructure that Clinton had promised the Democratic faithful in his campaign. In effect, Clinton spent much of his presidency shortchanging the Democratic Party's constituency so he could pay down the debts run up by his two Republican predecessors. As a result, George Bush II is the lucky recipient of a massive fiscal surplus, which he fully intends to use for military spending and tax cuts to promote the interests of the Republicans' higher-income clientele.

[snip]

...[Greenspan's] underlying motive was to restrain federal domestic spending, rather than contain impending inflation. Greenspan is, after all, an ideological conservative, an early acolyte of the social Darwinist novelist Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan's choice for Fed chair. Greenspan was also from Wall Street and has been trained to view the stock market as the fundamental measure of the country's economic health.

I guess he sure fooled me. It's the suit, and that face so full of wrinkled hauteur. Unlike Clinton, I had the benefit of hindsight. So, really had no excuse for buying into the "it's like Alan G was the Butch Cassidy of Economics and Bill Clinton was the Sundance Kid" trophe.