Tuesday, September 30, 2008

HORSERACE

Dem Congressman: 'The stock market goes up, the stock market goes down, that's not something that I am particularly concerned with.'

The RNC is spotlighting this comment:

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., told me yesterday that he felt no pressure at all to vote for the bill.

"For me it was an easy decision," Johnson said. "The bill has nothing in there that mandates workouts of these foreclosures that are pending. We have up to 5 million that are meant to occur over the next year."

"It was a Republican-caused bill and the Republicans, it looks like they failed to muster enough support to get this thing passed," Johnson told me.

What about the Dow going down 778 points?

"The stock market goes up, the stock market goes down, that's not something that I am particularly concerned with," he said. "I believe that the market will get over this initial shock that the corporate bailout plan did not go through, and that it will recover."

We have a political class that is, in some corners, economically illiterate. Yes, the market will recover eventually, but it makes a big difference if it takes weeks or years. On CNBC yesterday, there was a frustrating discussion about whether the terms "Wall Street" and "Main Street" were being used — and the point was that the two are intertwined; there's no way that Wall Street has terrible losses and Main Street isn't affected.

09/30 09:36 AMShare