Bill Bennett: “One of the things that has struck me since I have been in the Senate is that during debate in the Senate, particularly…”

“One of the things that has struck me since I have been in the Senate is that during debate in the Senate, particularly during morning business, Senators seem to have no sense of history. They seem to create a crisis out of the moment and have no sense of placing their statements in any kind of historic context. This is an opportunity for missing what really is happening. If you do not place something in its context, you do not understand it properly. For that reason, I have decided to talk a little bit about the debates that have been going on with respect to the economy, where the economy is, where the economy is going. Let me take listeners back to the election of 1992. I have particular focus there because that is the election in which I was first chosen to come to the Senate. During that election, there was a lot of conversation about the economy. We were in a recession, everybody said. We are in a terrible slowdown, everybody said. In fact, as we now know, looking at it in historic context, things were on the rise. There had, in fact, been a recession, but we were in recovery during the election of 1992. It just did not feel like a recovery. That is one of the historic lessons we should all learn. The sense of where we are is almost always lagging events. That is, we have a feel that we are in a recession when, in fact, we are in a recovery. On the flip side of that, we can have a feel that we are in a recovery when we are, in fact, in a recession.”