NYTimes.com: Op-Ed Columnist: The Awful Truth

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

[ Happy to publish opposing views djf]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:07:43 -0800
From: Shannon McElyea <shannon () swisscreek com>

"...One is [revelation] that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was
a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable
projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan
gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax
cut didn't include triggers - it went forward regardless of
how the budget turned out - it was "irresponsible fiscal
policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were
ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing. ..."


\----------------------------------------------------------/

Op-Ed Columnist: The Awful Truth

January 13, 2004
 By PAUL KRUGMAN


People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They
say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to
balance the budget. They say that the planning for an
invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there
was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that
the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.

But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where
they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the
halls of the Army War College.

I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul
O'Neill's appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn't
understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his
friends described, he didn't resign early from an
administration that was clearly anything but honest.

But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by
giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the
Bush administration.

Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based
largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr.
O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political
considerations - satisfying "the base" - trump policy
analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international
trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be
Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that "Reagan proved
deficits don't matter." But there are many other
revelations.

One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was
a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable
projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan
gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax
cut didn't include triggers - it went forward regardless of
how the budget turned out - it was "irresponsible fiscal
policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were
ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.

Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign
that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end
of the spectrum," knew that this wasn't true. He worried
that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only
"top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn't we already
give them a break at the top?"

Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of
regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East
at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001.

There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will
dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are
wise and good.

The question is whether this book will open the eyes of
those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is
a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the
administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy
theorist.

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep
getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the
capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as
bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College
says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined
the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark
and others that the administration was looking for an
excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light
of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's
character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have,
however, already opened an investigation into how a picture
of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr.
O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp
contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior
administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a
C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some
politically inconvenient facts.

Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is
in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short
run, however, these successes may not be all they're
cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in
the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four
weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its
peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of
jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population
that is even looking for work.

More important, having a few months of good news doesn't
excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible
leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to
deny.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?ex=1075012061&ei=1&en=
77d348fe88aa0930


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