In order to maintain his status, he's talking the most regressive tax he can find
Quote of note:
If lawmakers raise the cap and use the money to help pay for private accounts, that's when you'll know for sure that fiscal discipline is dead.
It's a sad thing, really, that it has taken this long for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to finally suggest that Congress consider tax increases to close the nation's gargantuan budget deficit. That should be a no-brainer, especially since the deficit - now at $412 billion - is largely due to tax cuts that President Bush and Congress have lavished on the most affluent over the past four years.
The recognition of the obvious by the Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, followed much waffling and was accompanied by oracular talk of spending cuts and his familiar act of fealty to Mr. Bush: a vague endorsement of private accounts in Social Security. In the end, all the huffing and puffing is testament to the strength of the anti-tax fixation of the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress, which has produced reckless tax cuts during wartime and a weak dollar in place of budgetary discipline. But as Mr. Greenspan has now made clear, the profligacy must end. "Unless we do something to ameliorate" rising debt levels, he told the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, "we will be in a state of stagnation."
