Indledning
IN February of 2001, Alan Greenspan, then still the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and still called the “Maestro”, testified to the Senate Budget Committee.

The committee wanted to get started on the tax cuts George W. Bush had promised during his campaign.

Mr Greenspan gave them his qualified blessing, with an argument that now sounds incredible: he was worried that America would pay down its debt too soon.

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Uddrag
Then several other things happened. The bubble in technology stocks evaporated, and with the shallow recession that followed, so did some of the forecast tax revenue.

Terrorists flew planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and taxpayers had to fund two wars.

Later in the decade, a huge financial crisis and deep recession reduced tax revenues, raised payments for things like unemployment insurance, and scared Congress into two separate stimulus bills.

The $5.6 trillion cumulative savings that the Office of Management and Budget predicted in 2001 turned into a $6.1 trillion cumulative deficit. America’s ten-year forecast was off by $11.7 trillion.

Alan Greenspan, one of the great economists of his or any generation, did not see these things coming. We can forgive him for that; few other people did, either.

The problem is not that he was wrong, but rather that we have no business thinking we know what’s going to happen over the next ten years.