Rah Rah! Goooooo dollar!

In the Soviet Union, Politburo members often simply invented economic data. Whatever economic policy thought existed at the thinktanks was either summarily ignored or molded to fit the ideological theories of party leaders.

Keep that in mind when reading about the Bush Treasury Department:

"Certainly when I was there, we worked very closely with [White House staff]; having the White House engaged on your issue meant you had strong backing and the political muscle if you needed it," said Abernathy's predecessor, Sheila C. Bair, a University of Massachusetts finance professor who was in the job until 2002. "The concern is, it's gone too much the other way, that the White House is driving it and not working collaboratively with Treasury."


The Treasury "should be a key formulator of policy," Bair said. "But the perception is that Treasury has become the cheerleader and deliverer of the message."

The pattern began in Bush's first term, when the White House abandoned the Clinton administration's practice of including the Treasury secretary in its daily political meeting and routinely rebuffed Secretary Paul H. O'Neill for his worries about budget deficits and tax cuts.

More recently, as congressional leaders and Washington lobbyists drafted corporate tax-cut legislation last fall, Treasury experts with strong objections were muzzled, according to a current Treasury employee and two senior Senate tax aides, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. Snow did not air his concerns about the legislation until it was just days from passage, too late to effect dramatic change. [....]

The Treasury "was one of those agencies you could always rely upon to provide a real base of information. It didn't always win, but it designed proposals for the public interest at large," said C. Eugene Steuerle, who headed the department's Office of Tax Analysis during the Reagan administration. Now, he said, "on a lot of issues, sometimes it doesn't have a seat at the table."

There is also concern about whether the department's clipped wings will damage the country's leadership in international financial circles at a time when the dollar is falling and the trade deficit is surging. Those trends may require the Group of Seven major industrial countries to act in a coordinated fashion to avoid a financial crisis.[....]

"After about a year of the current administration, some of my Japanese friends would take me aside -- people from the Ministry of Finance and [the] central bank -- and they would say, 'What's happened to Treasury?'" said Robert C. Fauver, a former career Treasury official who was a deputy undersecretary of state in President George H.W. Bush's administration. "At the moment, Treasury's interagency standing -- I'm not talking about the Cabinet-head level, but the department -- is the lowest in the 30 years that I've watched."[....]

Where is the Treasury official token cheerleader in this report? Here we go.

"Let's focus on the results," said Robert S. Nichols, a Treasury spokesman. "Under President Bush's leadership, the economy has been growing at rates as fast as any in nearly 20 years. That growth is largely the result of good monetary policy coupled with the president's tax relief, and the Treasury Department has played a key role."

Who knew that starving the beast included the Treasury? Soon economic policy will be under the aegis of the Pentagon.