On her show Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow argued in favor of additional government investments in the economy, describing the federal deficit as a secondary problem.

“Focusing on the debt and deficit to the exclusion of everything else is like arguing about the color you might paint your car while you’re crashing that car into a tree,” she remarked. “In Washington, the Republicans are arguing about, not a pretend problem, but something that’s a secondary problem — a problem that has no pressing real-world need to be the one problem we wreck everything else to solve. If you look at the real economy in the real world, outside of Sunday morning, what the economy actually needs right now is stimulus.”

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The liberal MSNBC host noted that many economists believed the United States was not growing fast enough to recover from the economic crisis. Maddow said that while the federal deficit needed to be addressed, stagnant growth should be the number one problem lawmakers try to solve.

Maddow’s guest, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, noted that Obama had proposed creating an national infrastructure bank along with extending unemployment insurance and payroll tax cuts.

“The money to average Americans is much more stimulative than money to rich folk,” he said.

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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