Greenspan's True Colors - chairman of Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan's views on minimum wage - Brief Article

Progressive, The, Sept, 2001 by Matthew Rothschild

At a House Financial Services Committee hearing on July 18, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said he was in favor of eliminating the minimum wage. Under direct questioning from Bernie Sanders, the socialist and independent from Vermont, Greenspan owned up.

Sanders: My understanding is, unless you have changed your view, that you are opposed to raising the minimum wage, which is today at a disastrously low $5.15 an hour. So I'd like you to tell us if you think that a working person or a family can live on $5.15 an hour. ... Can you tell the American people why you think not raising the minimum wage, maintaining a disastrous trade policy, and giving huge tax breaks for the rich works for the benefit of the average American?

Greenspan: Certainly.

Sanders: I and millions would love to hear it.

Greenspan: ... With respect to the minimum wage, the reason I object to the minimum wage is I think it destroys jobs. And I think the evidence on that, in my judgment, is overwhelming. Consequently, I am not in favor of cutting anybody's earnings or preventing them from rising, but I am against them losing their jobs because of artificial government intervention, which is essentially what the minimum wage is. So it is not an issue of whether, in fact, I'm for or against people getting more money. I am strongly in favor of real incomes rising, and, indeed, that's the central focus of where I would come out.

Sanders: Are you for abolishing the minimum wage?

Greenspan: I would say that if I had my choice, the answer is, of course.

Sanders: You would abolish the minimum wage?

Greenspan: Well, I would, yes. Because if what I say is accurate, then the minimum wage does no good to the level of ...

Sanders: And you would allow employers to pay workers today $2 an hour if the circumstances provided that?

Greenspan: The problem is that they will not be paying $2 an hour because they won't be able to get people.

I spoke with Sanders the next day, and he was still stunned by Greenspan's comments. "I had always known that Greenspan was a rightwing Republican, but frankly how far right did surprise me," Sanders said.

Thomas J. Nagy got in touch with me in mid-July. He said he wanted to send me a paper he had written about a Pentagon document that discusses Iraq sanctions. I said sure, I'd take a look.

The document was "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," and it's a shocker. But I told him I'd already seen mention of that document, though not in The New York Times or The Washington Post. By e-mail last fall, I received a copy of an article from the Sunday Herald of Scotland that discussed the document, and that clip has been in my Iraq file ever since. (Turns out Nagy had fed the document to the Sunday Herald.)

So I asked him what was new. He said he had some additional documents on the same subject that have never before been publicized. Send them along, I said.

I was not prepared for the level of cold calculation and blatant immorality in the documents. Taken together, their import is astonishing --and revolting. When the inglorious history of Iraq sanctions is written, these documents will demonstrate a level of callousness that is almost unspeakable.