Barney Frank: Hero

There've been some depressing forecasts coming out of Davos:

Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff kicked off the Wednesday discussion with a simple, depressing argument: The banking collapse is morphing into a long-term crisis of government debt. Instead of financial panic, we now face an "illusion of normalcy," with governments stepping in to guarantee everything. They've succeeded in fending off another Great Depression -- great! -- but at the cost of skyrocketing debt. And if history is any guide, he said, financial crises are often followed precisely by a wave of sovereign debt crises a few years later. "In countries like the United States and Britain, I'm not talking about default, but we certainly may have to see very painful political crises," Rogoff predicted, "belt tightening, higher taxes, slower growth." Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, believes we're fooling ourselves if we think otherwise: "We may tell ourselves we're better, we've figured things out … we’re different. I submit to you: We're not."



Barney Frank, who attended the session, thought he spied the answer in the wallets of the audience. "I think almost every American here pays much less in taxes than you ought to," he told the assemblage. "I'm going to go back and try to raise the taxes of most of the people who attended here."

And this is why people love Barney Frank.

Photo credit: By Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

