John Yarmuth: “Thank you. One of the things that I want to follow up on what you were talking about was we were sent here to solve…”

“Thank you. One of the things that I want to follow up on what you were talking about was we were sent here to solve problems. And I think one of the reasons that we have gotten into the predicament we're in is because a lot of people in the White House and in this Congress thought that you can govern by dogma. And when people say the free market's infallible or that regulation is bad or government should get out of the way and we hear those kinds of dogmatic philosophical statements, a lot of people bought into those. And what we see time after time, and I guess we are all slow learners in this country, but what we see time after time, whether it's with the subprime mortgage, whether it's with Katrina, or in all sorts of areas, with our health care system, is that dogma doesn't do very well when the rubber meets the road. There are real facts that we have to deal with. So we come here, and I know a lot of people, when we try to suggest that the disparity between rich and poor has gotten too great or that corporations have too much power, think we are playing at class war or we are trying to pit one part of society against the other. And that's not at all what we're doing. And I hope the audience has understood that everybody tonight has talked about fairness and, dare I say it, balance, and we are talking about the fact that in this country over the last couple of decades the economic pendulum has swung way too far to one side.”