Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire [Paperback]

James K. Galbraith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2006

In these essays James K. Galbraith wrote the history of Bush's presidency while it happened. This work contains Galbraith's most influential writings on current affairs along with new commentary, and explores the descent to disaster in Iraq and the ongoing transformation of the American economy under the steerage of Alan Greenspan. Important contributions examine the new U.S. strategic doctrine, the adverse economics of wars of occupation, the collapse of the technology bubble and its aftermath, the campaign against Social Security, the political economy of the 2004 election, the subversion of American voting as witnessed in Ohio, Hurricane Katrina and the fate of the dollar.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Galbraith for the 21st century! Prescient, lucid, elegant. Where others are lost groping in the shadows, James K. Galbraith sees the big picture. His writing is like a torch that guides us through the cave of the present into the light." --Sidney Blumenthal, former senior advisor to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

About the Author

JAMES K. GALBRAITH is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and  is a professor in the Department of Government.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (November 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230019013
• ISBN-13: 978-0230019010
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,766,521 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biting critique of orthodox economics, October 17, 2011

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire (Paperback)

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

In this excellent collection of essays, written between January 1995 and April 2006, he demolishes President Bush's record, especially his arguments for the war on Iraq, and he also criticises Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's policies.

He writes on the feeble liberal prescription for recovery, "As for training, the problem is not a shortage of skills. It is an extreme shortage of good jobs, combined with bad pay and poor working conditions."

He writes, "for a project of national reconstruction and investment, much of the necessary funds can, and properly should, be borrowed. Policy should do what is necessary to restore jobs. Full employment, sustainable development, and national security are proper goals for policy. Deficit reduction, as such, is not. Public debt to enrich the wealthy is one thing. Debt to rebuild the country is something else again." Of course, this is directly relevant to politics here in Britain. The Coalition is not on a route to recovery but on the road to disaster.

Professor Galbraith concludes, "The economic commitment, in turn, must be to full employment here, to egalitarian growth in Europe and Japan, and to a worldwide development strategy favoring civil infrastructure and the poor. Public capital investment, stronger unions and a high minimum wage should frame the domestic agenda. Overseas, crackdowns on tax havens and the arms trade, a stabilizing financial system and an end to the debt peonage of poor countries should be among the high priorities of a new structure.

"The truths are that egalitarian growth is efficient, that speculation must be regulated, that crime starts at the top, and that peace is the primary public good. These truths are poison to predators and the reason they have fostered and subsidized an entire cynical intellectual movement devoted to `free' markets, a class of professor-courtiers now everywhere in view."