This time from Paul Krugman, leading to speculation that their might be a League of Pauls somewhere. If so I'm not a member of it. Back to Mr. Krugman, who comments on some of the juicier bits of the book.
"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?"
The problem is that we have two different groups looking at these facts. One side believes that accusations they made months ago are now justified (which seems to be the case). The other side believes that the deceptions of the administration don't matter or must not have happened. If the Bush administration stretched the truth a bit, it was in the service of a higher goal, and at any rate, they certainly believed what they were saying. And if you question how we got to war, you must prefer the Iraqi people be suffering under Saddam Hussein's rule.
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