Seeing Through the B.S.

Mark Steyn's 4 C's - Chas, Cramer, cabinets & capitolism

Transcript of The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Mark Steyn: Yeah. No, I think this is the completely…I mean basically, what they keep doing is they’re trying, as I said on this show a couple of weeks ago, I think they’re trying to re-inflate a credit bubble. And no matter how many trillions of dollars you pump into that, you can’t do it. People are still talking about it as if the problem is getting the banks to lend. Anyone who’s tried understands that the banks are actually willing to lend at the moment. It’s that people are unwilling to borrow. And I can understand that. If you look at the amount of money that the Obama administration and Congress wants to spend, we are going to have some serious tax hikes six months, a year down the road. That being the case, do you really want to take on new monthly payments for anything? It’s not that institutions aren’t lending. It’s that people quite rightly and quite rationally aren’t borrowing at the moment.

Hugh Hewitt: I also was thinking today when he said we needed another trillion for TARP II that today, the first big scandal tying Congress to TARP I came out, the New York Times reporting that Maxine Waters...

MS: Right.

HH: ...helped steer $12 million dollars to a bank in which it alleges her husband had equity.

MS: Right, and this is what is horrible about this hideous form of managed capitalism that we’re now getting in this country. There was an interesting typing error over at National Review the other day on the website. Instead of capitalism, they spelled it capitolism, and that’s basically what we’ve got. We've got capitolism, in which people like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters are picking the winners and losers. No good is going to come of that. No good is going to come of that. If they’re not actively corrupt, as a lot of the political class is in Washington, then they're incompetent. But either way, the idea that they can re-calibrate not just the U.S. economy, but also the global economy, I think, is laughable.