Watch the Senate Debate from Friday, January 8th with candidates Martha Coakley (D), Scott Brown (R), and Joseph L. Kennedy (I).
Available as:
Quicktime Video
Windows Media File
The above is a snippet from the WGBY web site.
I have decided that apparently the people of Massachusetts do need to hear debates among the candidates. According to polls, 41% of the electorate is considering voting for Scott Brown.
The Worcester T & G published Coakley, Brown, Kennedy Spar, an article about the debate.
My comment on their message board about their article:
I trust the honesty of the Worcester T & G in reporting on the Senatorial race.
After all, why shouldn’t I. It is not as if they only publish letters to the editor in praise of Scott Brown, but nothing for Coakley.
It is not as if they go through all the comments on their message boards and only pick the ones favorable to Brown to repeat in the next day’s paper.
Oh, wait a minute. That is exactly what they are doing.
I have now listened to the debate in its entirety. It is a shame that Martha Coakley is such a weak representative of what the Democrats are trying to accomplish. She didn’t call Brown’s and Kennedy’s nonsense for what it was in a strong enough way. This type of performance by Coakley is exactly why I voted for Capuano in the primary.
Kennedy must think he is running for emperor. One Senator from Massachusetts proposes to go to Washington and repeal this and that, right and left, as if he had that power. The Democrats with a 60 vote margin can barely get anything by the 39 Republicans. One Libertarian with no allies is going to go and change it all. You have to wonder what fairy land this guy is living in. He may be a student of History and Economics, but he didn’t tell you that he is a failing student.
Across the board tax cuts may have been proposed during JFK’s time, but the situation was quite different back then. Back then, the credit system was not frozen. Back then, we had not crossed the tipping point to where businesses were fighting for their lives and trying to preserve their capital in order to prevent bankruptcy. The housing market had not collapsed, and foreclosures were not at record highs. What would have worked back then did not work now. With the humongous tax cuts that Bush rammed through, you’d think that a recession would be impossible by Brown’s way of thinking. Of course most of the tax cuts went to wealthy people to invest in CDOs and RMBs and other real estate bubble causing investments. The tax cuts also added incentives for outrageous bonuses for unconscionable risk taking in the financial sector. Little of the tax cuts went to the middle and lower classes to spend on necessities.
When there is some stiffness in the system you can push it around with some tax cuts. When private spending has gone limp like a string out of fear, pushing on the tax-cut string is not very effective. That is exactly why the government has to spend money on the types of investments that were neglected during the boom years.
Another useful analogy might compare trying to push around an inflated economic balloon compared to trying to push around a burst balloon.
Brown is absolutely wrong that there has been no spending in Massachusetts on infrastructure projects. I see repaving projects going on all around me. I don’t believe the cash strapped cities and towns are putting out all this money from their own budgets.
You might be tempted to use my argument about tax cuts to decry increased deficit spending, but you would be wrong. Bush had no business doing deficit spending during boom years. However, spending money to blow things up during boom times is quite different from spending money to invest in infrastructure, health care, and education during a recession. If Bush had spent that money on something useful, his profligate ways would still have been damaging, but not as damaging. He let our manufacturing base be outsourced away while he was busy fighting wars of choice.