Novak on Greenspan

There’s been a lot of furor surrounding the release of Alan Greenspan’s memoir, and Robert Novak takes his shots at the book in today’s Post:

While scathing in attacking increased spending by George W. Bush, he ignores massive non-defense spending hikes under Clinton and embraces the Democrat’s tax increase “as our best chance in 40 years to get stable long-term growth.”

Greenspan’s book treats Reagan’s tax-cutting, supply-side movement as if it never happened. Seeing no inherent benefits from a lower tax burden, he accepts the Democratic deficit-reduction formula that a dollar of higher taxes is equivalent to a dollar of reduced spending.

With the memoir retreating from his passive endorsement of Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, it is hard to tell the Greenspan of this book from a conventional Democrat. He indicates that his favorite colleague in the younger Bush’s administration was the dysfunctional Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who opposed the tax-cut strategy while ruining morale in his department.

The tip-off to Greenspan’s mind-set is his reference to Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad as a “fiscal conservative.” Conrad is an avowed deficit hawk whose advocacy of high taxes and high spending earned him a 16 percent fiscally conservative rating last year from the National Taxpayers Union.

I’m no Greenspan junkie, but it seems to me that Greenspan is forgetting, as seems common these days, that one needn’t be a raving supply-sider in order to support tax cuts, and that if you have a deficit, the problem isn’t tax cuts, but government bloat. It’s not that difficult a concept to embrace tax cuts as a good thing even while admitting that they don’t always and forever pay for themselves.