Beat me to it
Here’s a nice one. Send it to all your ignorant acquintances:
If You Favor a Policy, Please First Figure Out What it Is.
I moderated a panel on infrastructure and jobs at the Bipartisan Policy Center this morning, and one of the topics that came up was an infrastructure bank. Asked about it, one of the panelists said “what I’d like is to make all the members of Congress write a 100 word essay on what an infrastructure bank is.” It was a good line, and the audience laughed because it hints at something all too true when it comes to discussing policy: there are a lot of ferocious advocates of policies they can’t explain. […]
The passion is certainly real, and understandable. But the attachment to Glass-Steagall is not. Of the hundreds of times I’ve seen this, in all but two or three cases it’s been absolutely clear that the person advocating this could not describe the content of Glass-Steagall (presumably the one passed in 1933), nor the multi-decade unraveling of its major provisions. If anyone makes any of the obvious criticisms–“Really? You want to bring back Regulation Q?”–they’re not even particularly sheepish about admitting that well, of course, they’re not exactly familiar with the whole thing, but . . .
…What follows is usually a defense of the one provision they are familiar with: the enforced separation of commercial banking and investment banking activities. But when asked how this would have helped, when it was the pure play investment banks created by Glass-Steagall that had the most trouble, I’ve never seen any of Glass-Steagall’s fans provide a convincing explanation; indeed, it’s often been quite clear that they weren’t aware of this fairly well-known fact.