Keating economics

TPM:

For weeks, many of you have been asking me, why haven't the Democrats been bringing up McCain's history as a member of the Keating Five? Especially since it ties so clearly into today's financial crisis, his wife's company's ties to Keating and his history of supporting lax banking and finance industry regulation? When is the Obama campaign going to bring this up, I keep hearing.

Well, I think you've got your answer.

Must we look backward like this?

I suppose there is important substance here -- unlike Obama's connection to someone who blew up things when Obama was a young kid (Ayers) or the ethically dubious astroturfing of his strategist's independent partnership (Axelrod's ASK) -- but I do wish we could focus more on how to fix things rather than assigning blame.

*sigh* . . but as long as we're looking backwards, Obama wrote a letter in early 2007 which looks interesting.

Rightwingers will be quick to point out Obama's association with ACORN, which is viewed as being partly responsible for this mess. But I think Obama's letter from a year and a half ago shows that he was aware of the problem.

In considering how to judge a candidate's position on issues, I like to look at the totality of their proposals. It seems to me that under a President Gore or a President Kerry or a President Obama, we would not be so bogged down in Iraq or would have avoided it entirely. You do realize we're spending on the order of a trillion dollars there, right?

Think of how much better those resources (labor and material as represented by U.S. dollars) would have been spent on things like housing and healthcare rather than foreign nation-building by force of arms and private Haliburton and Blackwater-style contracts.

Point is, Obama seems to have the "radical" idea that the government's resources are better invested at home rather than trying to create friends in the Middle East.

As a libertarian, I'd prefer to radically slash the government's size and taxes across the board. But if that's not the choice I'm given -- if the choice is between Democratic social subsidies or the neocons' Vietnams and Iraqs and between these tax plans and these levels of fiscal responsibility -- I think we know what the saner choice is.