As close as Hillary Clinton and Robert Rubin are (he was finance chairman for her 2000 Senate race in New York), the former Clinton Administration secretary of the Treasury nonetheless took issue this week with her charges that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan bears responsibility for current budget deficits because of his public call for tax cuts in January 2001 (days after the inauguration of George W. Bush, who successfully pursued enactment of tax cuts). Speaking at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., celebrating Greenspan’s record 18 years at the Fed, Rubin said that Greenspan’s 2001 testimony offered “a truly complex framework for making the decision” and “[t]he framework, on balance, was right.”
