Greenspan on the grill.

• Position: Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan's testimony before the House Banking Committee's Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy

Bernie Sanders: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Greenspan. Thank you for joining us today. I have respect for you personally. I have very, very strong disagreements with your policy. It's incomprehensible to me that President Clinton would have reappointed you, in fact.

Mr. Greenspan, like every American, you are entitled to your political views. And according to newspaper reports over the years, you have made political contributions to Jesse Helms, to George Bush, to Bob Dole. You served on the committee to reelect or elect President Reagan, as I understand it. And of course, you worked as a key economic adviser for President Nixon and President Ford.

And I respect that. There's nothing wrong with it. We're all entitled to our points of view.

In 1985, as I understand it, you served as a consultant to many in the savings-and-loan industry. According to Time magazine, you suffered your "greatest embarrassment in 1985 when, as a private economist, you wrote letters to regulators in Congress endorsing Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan. Lincoln subsequently collapsed at a cost to taxpayers of $2.6 billion, and Keating landed in jail."

You also served as a consultant for fifteen other savings and loans, fourteen of which eventually failed.

In your confirmation hearings one year ago, despite the fact that the minimum wage of $4.25 was at its lowest point in forty years and millions of people were working for $4.25 an hour, you noted your opposition to raising the minimum wage.

This January, you told the Senate Budget Committee that "the appropriate capital-gains tax is zero." Currently, many Senate Republicans are calling for a capital-gains tax cut.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, 70 percent of the benefits of that tax cut will go to households earning over $100,000 a year.

Mr. Greenspan, I will grant you consistency in your support for trickle-down economics. In your career up to today, it is clear that you have advocated tax and monetary policies which have benefited the very richest Americans while at the same time your views reflect policies that come down very heavily on the middle class, the working class, and low-income people.

In 1983, you were appointed to chair, as I understand it, the Social Security Commission. Under your leadership, the highly regressive payroll taxes increased by about $200 billion. You chose to solve the Social Security crisis by raising the payroll tax on working...