John McCain once again demonstrates that he has no grasp of what caused the current financial market crisis. From Paul Krugman’s blog:
OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this.
Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!
The fact that Senator McCain continues to tout the benefits of deregulation in the banking industry — in spite of the current crisis that threatens to cripple the global economy — highlights just how out of touch McCain is. But of course, lest we forget, McCain himself has admitted he “still need[s] to be educated” about economic issues. Stephen Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal:
“I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.” OK, so who does he turn to for advice? His answer is reassuring. His foremost economic guru is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration). He’s also friendly with the godfather of supply-side economics, Arthur Laffer.
So let’s recap: John McCain “still need[s] to be educated” about economics, and he relies upon Phil Gramm for advice on economic issues. The same Phil Gramm that dismissively declared that the US is “a nation of whiners” suffering from a “mental recession.” The same Phil Gramm that wrote the Gramm-Bliley bill, which deregulated the banking industry and laid the groundwork for the current financial industry crisis.
