Ben Stein: "We don't know it's going to work!"

[carincross]

Last night on Larry King Live Ben Stein - conservative economist and sometime movie personality - said what very few people are willing to talk about! Other members on the panel were Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Karen Hughes and Kiki McLean.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0810/01/lkl.01.html

"BEN STEIN, ECONOMIST: I could just cry that this whole thing has come up at all. We had an economy that was running very, very smoothly -- I hate to say this -- under Mr. Clinton. It's been demolished by excessive deregulation and failure to regulate with the laws that were there. It's been demolished by the powers on Wall Street sucking trillions of dollars out of the U.S. economy and giving it to themselves in wages. In return, giving us the worst mismanagement of Wall Street since the 20s. It is just a crime what has been done to the people of the United States by this mismanagement both in the White House -- and I love Mr. Bush, but also by this mismanagement in Treasury and mismanagement -- serious, criminal mismanagement on Wall Street. …

"We don't know it's going to work. I mean, that's the big problem. We know we're going to throw a huge amount of money at it. We're going to throw a huge amount of money at it and we hope it will work. Mr. Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to explode and that just blew apart all trust in the financial system. It took 75 years for people to have trust that the federal government would bail out the financial system, not allow another run on the banks. Henry Paulson blew that apart in one minute of deciding not to save Lehman Brothers. …

"We have Henry Paulson, who took $1.2 billion -- most of it untaxed because of various laws -- out of Goldman Sachs, largely for putting together a giant subprime business at Goldman Sachs. He's going to be the guy who presides over the destruction of Wall Street, so that Wall Street, basically, is just a shadow of its former self, all because we didn't learn the lessons of the Depression -- you cannot trust Wall Street. You have to regulate them all the time. You cannot trust people with other people's money. You have to regulate them all the time. … Paulson is just not the guy to do it. He's a gambler. He's a Wall Street player. …

"What I fear the most is that they pass this, they start shoveling the money into Wall Street's greedy little paws and somehow banks still aren't lending. Banks say OK, that's fine, you've propped up the big players on Wall Street, but what about us? You haven't propped us up. What if we land and the economy goes into a depression or a severe recession and we don't get our money back? I think we should set a standard that any good sized bank or even any medium sized bank is going to be bailed out. You know, it's fine with me if they have nationalized banking in America. Banking is too serious to be left in the hands of gamblers."

[Two Americas]

1. amazing

If he were a member here and posted that he would be called a far left class warfare hate the rich extremist.

[lakeguy]

2. ben stein is usually 100% wrong 100% of the time

but he is at least 50% right on this one.

[snake in the grass]

3. He's still a Class-A glans penis...

...who should drink a bottle of HCL.

[BayjanDem]

4. "You cannot trust people with other people's money." N/T