Posted on 11/17/2002 5:53:26 PM PST by churchillbuff
O'Neill's days at Treasury numbered
November 14, 2002
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST If Lawrence Lindsey resigns as President Bush's national economic director, would the administration's economic leadership problems be solved while Paul O'Neill remains as secretary of the Treasury? The confidential answer from the White House is an unequivocal ''no.''
Lindsey will not stay much longer, but published reports that he will go while O'Neill stays at Treasury as the administration's chief economic spokesman are not in touch with reality. Bush's business supporters have told him for months that he must fill the Treasury portfolio with someone who believes in his tax-cutting strategy, or else follow his father as a one-term president. There are signs the president finally has accepted this advice.
Neither Lindsey nor O'Neill will be handed a pink slip immediately but will slowly fade away, saying they have resigned to tend private concerns. Delay is necessary because there is no clear successor at Treasury. After O'Neill, the White House flinches at the thought of picking another CEO. Nobody in Wall Street looks good. Something very different at the Treasury may result.
The White House recognizes but cannot publicly admit that its problem is Treasury secretary, not national economic director. The latter position was created in 1993 specially for financial maven and Democratic donor Robert Rubin, but he exerted little impact until he moved into the Treasury in 1995.
While confined to a coordinating job, Lindsey for months has been mercilessly battered and blamed in newspaper accounts for lack of a dynamic Bush economic policy. Anonymous administration sources attack Lindsey, a highly unusual practice within the Bush team. The largely mute O'Neill is not the culprit. R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, raises suspicions by invariably coming out well in these stories.
Friends of Lindsey are more than suspicious. They claim hard information that Hubbard, on leave as a Columbia University economics professor, has waged a disinformation campaign against his colleague. Lindsey has said as much to White House aides, who have questioned Hubbard. He denies committing an offense that carries a death sentence under Bush.
Lindsey is a devoted Bushie. He left Harvard's economic faculty to join the White House staff of the elder George Bush, who later made him the youngest Federal Reserve governor ever.
National economic director turned out to be a much tougher job, particularly when Lindsey is compared with the silky smooth performance of his national security counterpart, Condoleezza Rice. Lindsey suffered after he was quoted as estimating a $100 billion cost for attacking Iraq and he failed to get a late-blooming tax stimulus off the ground this fall.
O'Neill is widely perceived as turning up his nose at Bush's tax cuts. Indeed, he insists he believes that any secretary of the Treasury cannot hope to seriously influence the massive U.S economy. Neither political nor ideological, O'Neill was a career civil servant who flourished in the corporate world. He came to the Treasury because Dick Cheney remembered him from Nixon administration days as one of the smartest bureaucrats he ever met.
It is hard to find a prominent Republican who does not consider the O'Neill appointment a serious mistake. However, the president, always loath to punish loyal lieutenants, was immobilized by demands from Sen. Tom Daschle and other Democrats for a new economic team. Now, with his term half gone, the president can consider a change at Treasury.
But who, if not a CEO or a Wall Streeter? Financier Gerald Parsky, Bush's lieutenant in California, was an assistant Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and would vigorously promote Bush's tax policies; but he is a controversial figure, under attack from the California Republican right. Retiring Sen. Phil Gramm knows economics and politics, but is eager to start a new career in investment banking. The name of Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia is being mentioned in Bush's inner circle. The point is that the president seeks a real advocate at the Treasury for the first time.
Robert Novak appears on CNN's ''Capital Gang'' at 6 p.m. Saturday. E-mail: novakevans @aol.com
I will also note he is one of the few high level bureaucrats that I have written to that has responded with a personal letter addressing issues and questions directly, rather than sending out a useless form letter that ends up saying nothing at all.
Very interesting. Thank you!
It would be very interesting to hear from others on this---even from his detractors---if they would be forthright enough to get specific in their criticisms...something more than questions of style.
Don't get me wrong, style is not totally irrelevent at that level...but it shouldn't be everything...especially from those we look to to be setting policy in an area that is frankly 'the dismal science', after all.
Rubin had 'style', but like all things and people Clintonian, his policies were what were slowly but surely squandering the Reagan prosperity.
Perhaps he is if he possesses enough humility to see that his flat income tax/VAT schemes have been found severely wanting---that the tax reformers in the GOP have moved far beyond his platform of years past....all the way to the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment and the implementation of the NRST.
I would need a whole bunch of convincing to reach the point where I trusted that to be the case.
Great point.
I hope and pray that you are correct.
But the ITEBW sharks are circling.
Shark repellant, anyone? ;-)
In case you haven't noticed, the NY Times, and thus the media, is DESPERATELY trying to get the point of the wedge in somewhere...ANYWHERE!
Exactly so and the White House is quite aware of what is going on!
The New York times is obviously unaware as to what happened when the media in Texas made attempts to stampeed Bush here. Lindsey and O'Neil will be around for a WHILE I think!
O'Neill Further Tax Relief Coming;MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer, 5/21/2001
``We believe we will demonstrate in the next few years that we are still generating more money than we need to conduct the nation's business and we will be able to give more money back to taxpayers,'' O'Neill said in a speech to the Independent Community Bankers of America, an association representing the country's smaller banks.
O'Neill made it clear that the administration would keep pressing for further tax relief. ``This is the first tax bill and not the last tax bill,'' he said
O'Neill said the next priority for the administration will be reform of the Social Security
In a newspaper interview, O'Neill said he would push for repeal of the federal corporate income tax and the federal tax on capital gains earned by businesses.
In an interview with the Financial Times, O'Neill said that the tax system would work better if the government ``collected taxes in a more direct way from the people, who were paying the taxes in any event.
its problem is Treasury secretary, not national economic director. The latter position was created in 1993 specially for financial maven and Democratic donor Robert Rubin, but he exerted little impact
1. The Democrats create a useless bureaucratic position to reward a big time fundraiser.
2. The Republicans perpetuate its existence despite the fact that prior to 1993 our country had gotten along quite well for 206 years without a "national economic director".
3. Repeat steps (1) and (2) about five million times, going back over every time the Republicans have succeeded the Democrats in the White House since 1952, and you get a pretty good idea of why our government is the way it is.
You must have missed this:
The Treasury is looking at long-term proposals to scrap the corporate income tax and replace it with a value-added tax, which would work like a national sales tax on consumer and corporate purchases.from Inching Away From Income Tax
Once again there was no, never has been, a reference from O'Neill to "scrap the income tax" for individuals...At least not one that I've found, if you know of one I'd like to see it in context.
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