>Folks can't quantify Greenspan's role in the boom versus those other things
>either, yet they go on about how Fed policy is this all powerful force that
>dominates every other aspect of macroeconomic policy.
Not exactly. The argument, as I'd make it, is that once underway, an expansion tends to feed on itself, unless it comes to a bad end through a financial collapse, a realization crisis, or a central bank tightening. We had none of these in the U.S. since the early 1990s. In a more normal business cycle, the Fed would have tightened long ago. Thanks to economic weakness abroad, seasoned with deflationary tendencies, the Fed didn't tighten. Some Fedsters wanted to, but Greenspan resisted them. Thus, while AG didn't "cause" the boom, he allowed it to continue, pushing U below 5% for quite a while. When the U rate stays below 5% for quite a while, good things tend to happen.
>Folks here systematically for their own ideological reasons attribute
>progressive gains in the last eight years to everything possible other than
>the struggles of the people who set out to achieve those results.
Not me; I try to see things as they are, and not be unduly gloomy or boosterish. You could just as easily have said: "Some folks, for their own ideological reasons, want to credit some of the gains enjoyed by the working class in the normal course of a bizcycle expansion to the struggles of people who set out to achieve those results."
If you can't reverse the slide in union density in a labor market this tight, when can you?
Doug