On the recordJanuary 19, 2010
I would like to say that this just didn't happen. We didn't just end up here a couple of Octobers ago and all of a sudden things just happened. Our government was controlled by a conservative, neoconservative ideology for most of the first decade in this century. From 2000 to 2008 they controlled the White House, and 2000 to 2006 they controlled the Congress. They implemented their economic philosophy, hook, line, and sinker. It got implemented. They controlled all of the levers of government. They passed their supply-side economics. They cut taxes for the wealthiest, saying that will stimulate the economy and everything will take care of itself. Deregulate Wall Street; everyone will be honest with each other, no one would possibly do anything wrong if we are not watching them, and they will behave themselves. They forgot to factor in that people get greedy when you don't watch them, and that is what happened on Wall Street. So my point on top of what the gentleman just said is this didn't just happen. We had leaders in Washington, D.C., who implemented an extreme ideology. That ideology got implemented here in the United States Congress. It was their ideology that was governing or not governing Wall Street. It was the lack of investments in jobs, education, health care that needed to be made.
