Mr. McCain and the Economy
Published: September 16, 2008
John McCain spent Monday claiming as he had countless times before — that the economy was fundamentally sound....
On Tuesday, he clarified his remarks. The clarification was far more worrisome than his initial comments. He said that by calling the economy fundamentally sound, what he really meant was that American workers are the best in the world....
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In clarifying his comments, Mr. McCain lavished praise on workers, but ignored their problems. That is the real insult.
For decades, typical Americans have not been rewarded for their increasing productivity with comparably higher pay or better benefits. The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives.
As for Wall Street, Mr. McCain blamed the meltdown on “unbridled corruption and greed.” He called for a commission to find out what happened and propose solutions. His diagnosis and his cure are misguided. The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.
The regulatory failure is rooted in a markets-are-good-government-is-bad ideology that has been ascendant as long as Mr. McCain has been in Washington and championed by his own party. If Mr. McCain adheres to some other belief system, we would like to hear about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/opinion/17wed1.html?hp
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