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Friday, November 04, 2005

Greenspan: A Virtuous Cycle And A Deluded Nation

Greenspan's testimony. He covers the oil problem but seems concerned about natural gas as a long-term situation. But:
If allowance is taken for the effects of Katrina and Rita and for the now-settled machinist strike at Boeing, industrial production rose at an annual rate of 5-1/4 percent in the third quarter.
On inflation:
The past decade of low inflation and solid economic growth in the United States and in many other countries around the world has been without precedent in recent decades. Much of that favorable performance is attributable to the remarkable confluence of innovations that spawned new computer, telecommunication, and networking technologies, which, especially in the United States, have elevated the growth of productivity, suppressed unit labor costs, and helped to contain inflationary pressures. The result has been a virtuous cycle of low prices and solid growth.
Greenspan attributes the low inflation in the world partly to the entrance of ex-Soviet Union, Chinese and Indian workers into the world free labor market. On the federal budget:
...our budget position is unlikely to improve substantially further until we restore constraints similar to the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, which were allowed to lapse in 2002. Even so, the restoration of paygo and discretionary caps will not address the far more difficult choices that confront the Congress as the baby-boom generation edges toward retirement. As I have testified on numerous occasions, current entitlement law may have already promised to this next generation of retirees more in real resources than our economy, with its predictably slowing rate of labor force growth, will be able to supply.
And, as he points out to Congress, resolving the situation is not optional and lying about it is not helping:
We owe it to those who will retire over the next couple of decades to promise only what the government can deliver. The present policy path makes current promises, at least in real terms, highly conjectural. If fewer resources will be available per retiree than promised under current law, those in their later working years need sufficient time to adjust their work and retirement decisions.

Crafting a budget strategy that meets the nation's longer-run needs will become ever more difficult and costly the more we delay. The one certainty is that the resolution of the nation's demographic challenge will require hard choices and that the future performance of the economy will depend on those choices.
I doubt many newspapers will cover this part of Greenspan's testimony.


Comments:
Can you say Social Security Reform?
 
SSSSicak ,,,, Soookcita,,,,, SEEEciiiaaiiieeee.

BUSH IS BAD!

(That's what always happens after I read DU!)
 
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