Legal Daily News Feature
Reid v. Angle, Part 4 By Joshua Nave This is part four of commentary on the recent debate between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and challenger Sharron Angle. The next set of questions focuses squarely on the economy.
10/22/10
- but they have forgotten the lesson of President Clinton: It’s the people, stupid.
Okay let’s move on to the economy, and this is for you, Senator Reid. Nevada has the highest foreclosure rate in the country. Las Vegas has the highest unemployment rate in the country. In fact the jobless rate has soared five percentage points in Nevada since President Obama has taken office. At what point will you stop putting the blame on President Bush and start blaming the current President, Barack Obama? Reid:
Reid’s answer is technically correct but is of little comfort to the nearly 15% of Clark County that is unemployed or the thousands of people who have already lost or are in the process of losing their homes. Nor does a moratorium on foreclosures by one bank do much to help the majority of Nevada home owners who now owe more on their house than it is worth. In his debate with Congresswoman Dina Titus, Dr. Joe Heck made the point that we need to get people to think about their house as a home and not as an investment.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Uh, the fact is, I’ve worked hard to do something to help beleaguered Nevada homeowners. Two hundred million dollars here to work on mortgages that are underwater. Forty-eight thousand people in Nevada now have homes as a result of legislation that I pushed, the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit. We, as a result of my pressure on Bank of America, now have no more foreclosures by them, there’s a moratorium there.
In January of 2009, the economy was in freefall. Any hopes of a full recovery by the end of 2010 were naïve at best, and the Democrats may have overextended that hope 2 years ago.
We have to do more of course, But we have to understand that they won’t be able to do to us again as I indicated earlier, what they did to us before, because we passed Wall Street reform that will stop these greedy bankers on Wall Street from taking advantage of homeowners.
Of course not. You know, Mitch, when we, when President Bush took office, he had a surplus, over ten years of seven trillion dollars. We were paying down the debt in the Clinton years. We paid down the debt by $600 billion. So we’re in this hole, and we’re trying to dig out of it.
This was yet another opportunity missed by Reid because he
We lost eight million jobs during the Bush years, we’ve created three and a half million of ‘em. There’s a long ways to go and no one’s satisfied where we are, but let’s realize where we were and how far we’ve come.
skipped over the question. This question is really at the heart of not only this election, but elections across the country this year. Democrats made huge gains in 2008 largely because the electorate blamed President Bush and Congressional Republicans for the collapsing economy, but in the two years that have followed that antipathy has turned on Democrats for not bailing the country out of this crisis fast enough. Democrats have largely responded by touting specific bills and numbers - and in fact by the numbers, the recession is over
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Do you think President Obama shares enough, as much blame as President Bush? Reid:
That’s no solace to somebody that’s been, lost a job, or a home, but we’ve made progress. Small signs of recovery from Senator Reid. Too little, too late.
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