Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Why Larry Summers is Speaking Out Against Joe Biden's $1.9 Trillion Spending Program

Larry Summers

David Warsh, a former Boston Globe columnist and current weekly columnist at his own website, Economic Prinicipals, provides this interesting background story:

Some years ago, I set out to write a little book about Harvard University’s USAID project to teach market manners to Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government in the 1990s.  The project collapsed after leaders of the Harvard mission were caught seeking to line their own pockets by gaining control of an American firm they had  brought in to advise the Russians. Project director Andrei Shleifer was a Harvard professor. His best friend, Lawrence Summers, was US Assistant Treasury Secretary at the time.

There was justice to be served. The USAID officer who blew the whistle, Janet Ballantyne, was a Foreign Service hero. The victim of the squeeze, John Keffer, of Portland, Maine, was an exemplary American businessman, high-minded and resourceful.

But I had something besides history in mind.  By adding a chapter to David McClintick’s classic story of the scandal (How Harvard Lost Russia, 2006), I aimed to make it more complicated for former Treasury Secretary Summers, of Harvard University, to return to a policy job in a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration.

It turned out there was no Clinton administration. My account, Because They Could, appeared in 2018. So I was gratified last August when, with the presidential election underway, Summers told an interviewer at the Aspen Security Forum that “My time in government is behind me and my time as a free speaker is ahead of me.” Plenty of progressive Democrats had objected to Summers as well.

Warsh's deed may have done more than he could have imagined. With Summers apparently unlikely to get a political position ever again, he is starting to speak some truth as he has no reason to speak crony hogwash to protect appointment to a future government position.

Is this why he is warning about Joe Biden's mad $1.9 trillion spending plan? SEE: The Larry Summers Christmas Eve Miracle

-RW

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