Chief Hypocrite and Destroyer of Many Lives

Alan Greenspan... he is the architect of the Great Recession. Apparantly he is unaware of how many lives he has ruined. How many millions he has condemned to years of unemployment. How many he has driven to suicide.

You would think that if he knew how much real pain and damage he has done he would crawl into a hole and not come back out. But he hasn't. He is back with more bad medicine.

Here's a bit from a post by Robert Reich on his blog that states the facts and makes it clear that Alan Greenspan is the architect of all the woe and misery we see today:

When I was a small boy at the start of the 1950s, my father gave me my first economics lesson. “Bobby,” he said with obvious concern, “you and your children and your children’s children will be repaying the national debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

I didn’t know what a national debt was, but I remember being scared out of my wits.

Dad was wrong, of course. Even though the national debt then was a much higher percentage of the national economy than it is today, it shrank as the economy boomed. My children have never mentioned FDR’s debt. My granddaughter (almost 2) will never pay a penny of it.

Dad, now 96 and still in good health, recognizes how wrong he was then. He admits FDR’s deficit spending not only won World War II but it also got America out of the Great Depression.

But now another gaggle of deficit hawks is warning us against more federal spending. “The current federal debt explosion is being driven by an inability to stem new spending initiatives,” warns Alan Greenspan in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, calling for budget cuts and saying “the fears of budget contraction inducing a renewed decline of economic activity are misplaced.”

My dad learned from his mistakes. Alan Greenspan obviously didn’t.

Contrary to Greenspan, today’s debt is not being driven by new spending initiatives. It’s being driven by policies that Greenspan himself bears major responsibility for.

Greenspan supported George W. Bush’s gigantic tax cut in 2001 (that went mostly to the rich), and uttered no warnings about W’s subsequent spending frenzy on the military and a Medicare drug benefit (corporate welfare for Big Pharma) — all of which contributed massively to today’s debt. Greenspan also lowered short-term interest rates to zero in 2002 but refused to monitor what Wall Street was doing with all this free money. Years before that, he urged Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and he opposed oversight of derivative trading. All this contributed to Wall Street’s implosion in 2008 that led to massive bailout, and a huge contraction of the economy that required the stimulus package. These account for most of the rest of today’s debt.

If there’s a single American more responsible for today’s “federal debt explosion” than Alan Greenspan, I don’t know him.

Some people have no shame. Some people don't seem able to give up the limelight. Some people -- like a drunk driver -- are unable to recognize what a menace they are. Alan Greenspan needs to get out of his car and hand over his keys and never get back in a car again. In fact, I would go one step further: Alan Greenspan should be carefully investigated for fraud and malfeasance in office and other crimes and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for anything he has ever done, even just jay-walking. He needs to feel some of the pain he has caused others.