Until we are on a pay-as-you-go budget, until we have stopped inflation, I do not intend to support any public works project in the United States.
- Gramm, 10/9/75
Minimum wage laws tend to cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder. The plain truth is there should be no minimum wage law in this great land of free enterprise.
- Gramm, 5/17/89
We're the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat.
- Gramm, 9/6/81
Anyone who's spent any time at all in Texas and/or followed former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-12th cent.) over the years knows that the man is flat-out brilliant. The man knows his $#!%...when it comes to economics and economic theory. Unfortunately, when brilliance, ignorance, and a total lack of common sense inhabit the same body, Phil Gramm is all too often what ensues. Here's a man who can discuss abstract economic theory until his victim's eye roll back into their skull and they expire from sheer intellectual overload. Unfortunately, Gramm is a classic case of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Combine that with traditional Conservative disdain for those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and what you get is a clueless, heartless ideologue completely devoid of compassion and common sense.
I understand the point that Gramm was trying to make, which is that the constant drumbeat of bad economic news can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps if Gramm had simply made that argument, none of this would have happened. The problem, though, is that Gramm, in speaking for John McCain, has firmly stamped the Republican Presidential candidate as thoroughly out of step and out of touch with the very middle class whose votes he so desperately needs.
If he had chosen to, Gramm could have made a convincing argument that this country's overall state of mind may well be contributing to the current recession. Instead, he chose to blame Americans for the problems created by Conservative like himself. Sadly, in true, brain-dead American fashion, far too many American Sheeple will vote for John McCain...and thus (once again) against their own economic interests.
If McCain can pummel Barack Obama for a misstatement or verbal f--k-up made by one of Obama's surrogates, then he needs to be man enough to accept the blame when one of his advisers attempts to swallow their Bruno Maglis. This is what you get, I suppose, when you surround yourself with self-absorbed ideologues who neither know nor care what everyday Americans are dealing with every single day.
Jeebus...what a (&^%$#@ DUMB@$$....
