McCain, Busted!

I think it's fairly obvious that the current Wall Street crisis is pretty much the best argument one could imagine in favor of government regulation of the financial industry. Given that banks doing stupid things might result in the government being forced to spend $700 billion to save them from themselves, it seems reasonable that the government might take steps to save the banks from getting into such trouble before it starts.

Since the possible bailout of Wall Street is, for now at least, it would look bad if one of the presidential candidates had several recent statements on the record supporting deregulation. Unfortunately for Senator McCain, he has such a record.

Despite recent statements in support of regulation, McCain was clearly in support of deregulation, at least before such a position became completely untenable.



As he told the Wall Street Journal in March, McCain is "fundamentally a deregulator".

In an article written for the September/October 2008, so presumably written recently, of Contingencies, a magazine for actuaries (like my father), McCain wrote:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

So he's using deregulation of the financial industry as a model for his plan for healthcare, and he did this persumably within the past few weeks. Wow

McCain was clearly wrong on the most important issue out there. How is it possible that this race is still close?