Barney Frank, Chair of the House Banking and Finance Committee, shot back at him a response that has been largely missing in the debate: spending on the Iraq war.
DeMint: It's the largest spending bill in history and we're trying to call it a stimulus.
Frank: The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the one in Iraq. If we're going to talk about spending, I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinary expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good in my judgment.
I don't understand from my conservative friends: building a road, building a school, helping to get health care, that's wasteful spending. But that war in Iraq, that's going to cost us over a trillion dollars, yeah, I wish we hadn't done that; we would have been in a lot better shape fiscally. . .
That's the problem. . . . we look at spending and say don't spend on highways or health care. Let's build weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don't need them. Let's have hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check. Unless everything is on the table, then you are going to have a disproportionate hit in some places.
Good for Barney. It's time someone put Iraq on the table when the Repubs complain about spending and what we can't afford.
And today, the fight is taken up in the Senate. Too bad it's going to be an ugly fight instead of a colleagial debate over genuine policy differences. But that's the game the Republicans seem determined to play.
Ralph
To me, there is a relatively simple way to deal with this economic crisis. According to Barry Ritholtz, author of 'Bailout Nation', the total cost of the bailouts "now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars"
ReplyDeleteThere are 305 million people in the US. Instead of bailing out banks and automakers and trying to fund departments to create jobs, we could give every citizen in the US $15,000.
Let's be honest, most people would save some of that, pay off some debt, but most people would also spend at least half of that buying things - cars, electronics, clothing, going out to eat, putting a deposit on a house, etc.
If instead of bailing out corporations we had given that money directly to citizens, probably $1 trillion of debt would have been eliminated, $1 trillion gone into savings, including stocks, and $2 trillion dumped into the economy to purchase goods.
So why aren't we doing this?
I don't know, Richard. Last year, when gasoline prices were approaching $4.00/gallon, I came up with the idea that we could solve our dependence on foreign oil quickly, simply by giving a million Toyota Priuses to people. We would immediately cut gasoline consumption by 25%, and it would also be a major contribution to reducing emissions.
ReplyDeleteSomehow, these common sense, think-outside-the-box solutions don't seem to appeal to politicians.
"...building a road, building a school, helping to get health care, that's wasteful spending. But that war in Iraq, that's going to cost us over a trillion dollars, yeah, I wish we hadn't done that; we would have been in a lot better shape fiscally."
ReplyDeleteDeMint is implying that the Stimulus Package is just a "trick" to get us to spend our money for the public welfare [which is what government is for] and put the unemployed to work doing it [which is what Stimulus means]. But Frank is asking the biggest question of them all, "What was the War in Iraq for?" I still can't answer that. And best of all, Barney says "I wish we hadn't done that." We all wish that. In fact, it should be the title of a book about the whole George W. Bush Presidency.
Several years ago, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Barney Frank spoke to the Executive Council about the economics of health care.
ReplyDeleteHe made the cogent point -- which you never hear, but it is echoed here -- that in every other business, we applaud increases in utilization and innovation. Why do we insist that cost of medical care have to be kept down?
He was no advocating wasteful spending, but simply this argument: we spend trillions on Iraq and on bailing out Wall Street; but we can't afford to make sure everyone has basic health care? We can afford any war bush leads us into, but we can't afford to do anything about the environment, because it will cost too much.
Barney is saying bullshit.