When the going gets tough.......

.....Alan Greenspan shows himself to be nothing but a political hack.

Paul Krugman gives it to Ayne Rand disciple and political hack Alan Greenspan with both barrels today.

Four years ago, Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, asserting that the federal government was in imminent danger of paying off too much debt.

On Wednesday the Fed chairman warned Congress of the opposite fiscal danger: he asserted that there would be large budget deficits for the foreseeable future, leading to an unsustainable rise in federal debt. But he counseled against reversing the tax cuts, calling instead for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Does anyone still take Mr. Greenspan's pose as a nonpartisan font of wisdom seriously?

Of course it's all part of the plan of Social Darwinists like Grenspan and Grover Norquist to undo the "New Deal" by starving the beasts.

Until the 1970's conservatives tended to be open about their disdain for Social Security and Medicare. But honesty was bad politics, because voters value those programs.

So conservative intellectuals proposed a bait-and-switch strategy: First, advocate tax cuts, using whatever tactics you think may work - supply-side economics, inflated budget projections, whatever. Then use the resulting deficits to argue for slashing government spending.

And that's the story of the last four years. In 2001, President Bush and Mr. Greenspan justified tax cuts with sunny predictions that the budget would remain comfortably in surplus. But Mr. Bush's advisers knew that the tax cuts would probably cause budget problems, and welcomed the prospect.

In fact, Mr. Bush celebrated the budget's initial slide into deficit. In the summer of 2001 he called plunging federal revenue "incredibly positive news" because it would "put a straitjacket" on federal spending.

They might have pulled it off if the had attempted it during Bush's first term but of course Bush was busy trying to take out the guy that tried to kill his daddy. The Pew Research Center Poll agrees with the New York Times/CBS Poll that the center piece of this plan, Social Security Privitization, is a no sale. Republican lawmakers look at the polls and see their chances of reelection in jeopardy if they support the Bush plan. Bush's "political capitol" speech is looking increasingly like another "mission accomplished" moment.

And Alan Greespan's place in history could have been as an economic maestro, instead he will be seen as just another political hack.