Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is chairman of the House Budget Committee and has put forward a plan that would end Medicare. He was telling another reporter that he was concerned about providing poor people with a safety net when we had this exchange:
Sam Husseini: If you’re a fiscal conservative and you want to provide a safety net, why wouldn’t you be for something like a single-payer health care system?
Paul Ryan: I think a single-payer health care system would be a disaster for people who need health-care the most. I think it would cause rationing, waiting lines. I think it would be a fiscal house of cards, I think it would help accelerate a national debt crisis and hurt the economy.
Sam Husseini: When the Wall Street collapse happened and there was a Wall Street bailout, which you voted for I believe.
Steny Hoyer: Yes, as did Mr. Ryan, my predecessor [at the microphone].
Husseini: — Everybody was saying ‘We gotta do this and then things will trickle down to regular folks,’ nobody said that we should help regular folks and that will trickle to the big banks. Obama yesterday [sic, Friday] said that it will take time for regular folks to get better. Is that really defensible, to tell — it’s a big emergency for the banks but not for regular people?
Hoyer: Well I don’t think those are the facts, either. Continue reading →
Robert Reich was secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sam Husseini: [On Saturday] Obama said fixing unemployment is going to take some time. How do you think such a statement can be justified given the urgency of helping the banks in 2008 and so on and now middle America is in trouble and there doesn’t seem to be real impetus?
Robert Reich: I don’t think the administration can simply rely on time to mend the economy. It needs to come up with a set of bold ideas, even if they can’t get them enacted, that will get jobs back. And the president has got to fight for them to be enacted. Continue reading →
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) is ranking member on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. We started our questioning by incorrectly attributing a quote from Rep. Spencer Bachus to Shelby that the proper role of the government should be to serve banks. As he and his assistant quickly noted, that quote wasn’t his and I apologize for the error, it was given to me from a typically very accurate associate who made a mistake. The rest of our questioning:
Sam Husseini: Your three biggest funders, according to Open Secrets — I don’t know if you want to dispute this [as he did the quote] — Travelers Company, J.P. Morgan and Blackstone group. Why shouldn’t regular people see things as you’re sort of doing the bidding of the big banks?
Richard Shelby: Well I haven’t done that. The people of Alabama know that I do their bidding and the American people know that I stand up for them. I don’t represent banks; I represent people. Some people represent banks but they’re hired to do this; I’m hired by the people of Alabama. Continue reading →
Seeking the Republican nomination for president, Herman Cain is former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and former deputy chairman of the civilian board of directors to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Other reporters questioned him on a poll that allegedly shows him tied with Sarah Palin for second place in Iowa.
I asked him — since he’s been outspoken against welfare allegedly creating a “culture of dependency” for poor people — doesn’t it amount to welfare when Wall Street gets bailouts, Federal Reserve has preferential policies for big banks, mining and broadcasting giants get giveaways from the government — shouldn’t huge corporations get off welfare as well?
Cain responded that “It’s time to get everyone off welfare” and plugged his proposal for a Fair Tax, saying that would stop the government from picking of winners and losers. (But many have stated that such a tax proposal would make further losers of low-income people.)
Cain claimed that he is “against the too big to fail philosophy” but then later said he was for TARP because we “needed to do something drastic” adding that “where I parted ways was when the administration was picking winners and losers.”
Cain wrote in 2008: “Wake up people! Owning a part of the major banks in America is not a bad thing. We could make a profit while solving a problem.” But buying stock would seem to be a way of “picking winners and losers.”
Then I referenced (unfortunately mangling the quote in the process), Jesus: “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” and asked how that related to Cain’s philosophy.
Cain said that his view was to “help those that help themselves.” After a bit of back and forth, Cain briefly mentioned “my giving and my compassion” — which would seem to run afoul of another of Jesus’ statements.
I sort of regret saying “Isn’t it time to get big business off welfare as well” at the beging of my questioning — the “as well” would make it seem that I agree with the notion that poor people should not be on welfare, which in any case was gutted during the Clinton administration. I also think I sort of bought into Cain’s tacit assumption in the back and forth that there aren’t alot of poor people who are working very hard and still can’t make ends meet. Full transcript of our exchange: Continue reading →
