AS AN oracle of the economy, Alan Greenspan continues to speak with a forked tongue.
The Federal Reserve chairman is sending a mixed message once again, warning on one hand that President Bush's huge budget deficits are "unsustainable" while on the other providing political cover for Mr. Bush's deficit-building plan for private investment accounts under Social Security.
This is the same Alan Greenspan, remember, who bestowed his personal blessing on the Bush tax cuts at a crucial point in their rush through Congress in 2001.
What Mr. Greenspan is not owning up to is that the entire Bush economic program is a mish-mash of contradictory theories and pipe dreams, designed to carry out an ideological mission rather than to keep the nation safe and prosperous.
Mr. Bush insisted on huge tax cuts tilted wildly in favor of the wealthy, all the while planning from almost the first moments of his administration on some day invading Iraq. Now that war - of choice, not necessity - soaks up a crushing proportion of the nation's wealth, and the President still blithely insists on making the tax cuts permanent.
On Social Security, Mr. Bush proposes diverting taxpayer money to the securities market, even though private investment accounts would do nothing to delay the program's long-term shortfall, while requiring the borrowing of $2 trillion - another boost to the deficit.In the Bush years, the federal budget has swung from solid surplus to humongous deficit, and Mr. Greenspan, who spent much of his long government career as a deficit hawk, still backs what can only be described as oxymoronic policies.
In addition to its contradictions, the Fed chairman's message is essentially an elitist one. Pull the Social Security and Medicare rugs from under the Baby Boomers, just as they retire, on the grounds that they've been "promised too much" by their government. Never mind that those promises are deliberately being undercut by the policies of George W. Bush.
Mr. Greenspan also is peddling the idea of a national consumption tax, even though such a tax would weigh most heavily on the poor, who must spend virtually all of what they make just to stay alive.
The latest Greenspan pronouncements came as the administration kicked off a 60-day campaign to sell the Social Security plan to a skeptical citizenry. In keeping with the administration's usual modus operandi, Republican backers already are deflecting honest policy doubts by portraying questioners as "Bush haters."
Opinion polls are beginning to show, however, that the public in general has serious doubts about the Bush plan and is unwilling to swallow it whole like the tax cuts. Having been fooled once by this President and lock-step advisers like Mr. Greenspan, perhaps they're not about to be fooled again.
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