Phill Gramm On The Economy

McCain's economic advisor gave some serious straight talk on the economy to the Washington Times and while he is technically correct he pointed his finger at the wrong people as Ace points out. The MSM has been whining about the economy under Bush since he took office and has basically brainwashed the public into believing it despite seven years of continued growth. We have NOT been since the end of the Clinton era and are NOT now in a recession. A recession is signalled by two quarters of contraction in the economy not a slowing of the growth of it and we have expanded every quarter since the Bush tax cuts took effect. This is what Phill Gramm said in the interview.

In an interview with the Washington Times, Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.
“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”
“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.
“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.

I agree with Ace that the American people are not whiners but the talking heads and writers for the MSM certainly are with the exception of a very few like Larry Kudlow who has called our expansion over the last few years "the greatest story never told". Now if we could just keep a few hundred billion dollars in America and create hundreds of thousands of new high paying jobs for our citizens by expanding domestic oil production America will quickly boom again.
Obama had some snide condescending remarks to add but has offered no real solutions to the very real problems we face besides higher taxes and more government interference in the economy.