Mark Levin delivered a sobering keynote address at AFP’s “Defending the Dream” Conference in Washington last night. Mark’s on-air persona is irascible but he possesses – in my opinion – one of the brightest minds in media, period. He speaks with passion and knowledge.
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I think Gingrich and Cain performed a public service by breaking free of the pack and engaging in a real, extended, substantive public debate on key economic and entitlement issues. I hesitate to declare a winner because each brings unique strengths and experience to the discussion. Whether you agree or disagree, this is the sort of debate that provides light but not heat.
The following is the complete C-SPAN video. We hear too much from the moderators and warmup act – all informative but preliminary. Skip to 15.00 to get to the debate itself.
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Cato’s Tom Palmer has the correct take on the Occupy Wall Streeters’ grievances.
What caused the crisis, the indebtedness, the unemployment, the stagnation? The culprits are state agencies and enterprises, including our Federal Reserve (our government’s bank), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), which jointly flooded the country with cheap credit and encouraged and subsidized unsound banking and subprime mortgages, all to encourage wider home ownership, paper prosperity, and cozy relationships with their cronies. We got a housing bubble, mountains of unpayable debt, and a financial crisis. Thanks, Uncle Sam.
The Occupiers have the wrong address. The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York.
Back in 2008, Saturday Night Live did a great skit that caught the gist of the crisis and the cronyism that lay behind it. Clearly, the writers knew their current events. The point being that it all began in Washington, with policies that created a set of perverse incentives, the outcome of which were perfectly predictable to anyone with any knowledge of history.
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Austan Goolsbee is one of the president’s former economic advisers (count ‘em as they stream to the exits). Recently, he made an entirely predictable confession of sorts that both the “cash for clunkers” and home-buyer tax credit programs were a mistake. Do tell. I expressed my disgust for the “clunker” program more than two years ago.
Short-term gimmicks do nothing but unsettle the economic scene and are no substitute for the sort of steady policies needed in an economic crisis (like reduced taxes and government spending and insuring an adequate but not excessive money supply). That way our betters don’t scare the bejesus out of the very people we need to get things moving – that is, ordinary folks who buy, sell and spend.
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