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
And end up with BOTH a sales tax and an income tax, because, as mentioned above, the chances of getting rid of the 16th Amendment are somewhere south of nil.
Flat tax, all the way. And NOW!
He has consistently failed or refused to speak forthrightly and coherently in favor of tax cuts. This may be because he doesn't believe in them, but even if it's a matter merely of inept "style" as you put it, that's a disqualifier as well, because in the public arena, when you're trying to push the president's policies, STYLE COUNTS.
A solid one-two punch
TownHall.com ^ | 11/18/02 | Larry Kudlow
Fresh off his stunning midterm election victory, President Bush wasted no time in putting his newly acquired political capital to work. First, he slammed a homeland-defense bill through the Senate. Then -- the very next day -- he said he intends to offer "new ideas" on ways to stimulate the economy.
... So, the president and the Fed chairman appear to be cooperating in the development of a new pro-growth policy mix -- supply-side tax cuts to reignite business investment and risk taking, and easier money to finance a hoped-for growth spurt. If only they could get Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on board.
Inexplicably, O'Neill told a Fortune magazine conference that he didn't believe broad-based tax cuts are necessary. He would rather consider "targeted stimulus proposals" to help particular industries. This sounds like something from the Carter-Mondale era.
These off-the-reservation comments underscore the president's need to find a new captain for his economic ship -- someone who is completely in sync with the presidential growth package and has the communication skills to sell it to Congress and the public -- someone like New York Stock Exchange President Richard Grasso. His massive Rolodex of key financial-market players and his indefatigable can-do spirit make him an ideal choice to replace O'Neill, who's a fish out of water at the Treasury. More, such an appointment would punctuate the president's determination to move his pro-growth economic agenda forward.
Investors, of course, will wait
O'NEILL MUST GO!
The thing that made Reagan such a great President was not his own intelligence. It was that he knew that he was not smart enough to make all those decisions alone and hired the best people in each field and then listened to them.
Certainly, O'Neill doesn't agree with Dubya on a number of economic issues. But, that is with good reason. Although O'Neill may have a few shortcomings, he is much more of an expert on the economy than Dubya could ever dream of becoming. But, typical of Dubya, rather than listen to the experts around him, Dubya blindly goes his own way and dictates to the experts, that he should be listening to, what position he has already decided on. If Dubya would listen to the experts around him, he wouldn't have such economic problems. But, that would mean taking a stand on a tough issue and we all know that Dubya only takes a stand on issues that he is sure he can win. It seems that he's more worried about being seen as a loser, than actually doing something to fix the economy.
This is such a crock! You have got to be a .0005 percenter or a disrupter or have been sipping too much of the demonrat/liberal KoolAid.
Bush has pushed on many issues that most people thought had no chance of going anywhere, and time and time again, because he keeps going forward, he succeeds!
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