THE EXPERIENCE OF JOHN McCAIN

We are often told in this election that only a fool would vote for an untested politician like Sen. Obama. In these times of crisis the man with the most experience is the one who must be President. But experience is useless without the virtue of learning from your experiences. And here I think John McCain comes up short.

One of the original Reagan foot soldiers, John McCain has held a life long belief in the private sector being unfettered by government regulation. In the late 1980's that lack of regulation led to the collapse of the savings & loan industry. (It also earned the young Senator from Arizona a reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee, but that's another story.)

Now some 20 years later, following six years of a Republican Congress and Republican President, we have had the opportunity to again test the principal that ALL government regulation is bad. And in the last few weeks we have seen the results. The bailouts being proposed now make the Savings & Loan Bailout look like small change.

But up until 48 hours ago, Sen. McCain continued to insist that we MUST DEREGULATE! Which of course is the teachings of his top economic advisor Phil Gramm who engineered the original deregulation of the banking industry some 10 years ago.

Sen. McCain has even proposed putting Social Security into privatized hands (which of course meant your retirement was in your hands, same as your mortgage and your mutal fund.). Looking at the ups & downs of the market this last week make that a bit scarier today than it was six months ago.

But the best is this quote that will be appearing in an upcoming magazine article written by the EXPERIENCED John McCain. The title of the article is BETTER HEALTH CARE AT LOWER COST FOR EVERY AMERICAN from the Sept/Oct 08 issue of Contingecies.

"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."

I don't know about you but that quote makes me feel a little ill. (Note: He also plans on making your health care contribution taxable as opposed to both the present system & Sen. Obama's health care.)

So what we have is an article that was written so recently that it is yet to be published that describes a health care system with all the safe guards of the banking industry. It trumpets the wisdom of deregulating the banking industry. Current events seem to call into question his judgement, since for the last 48 hours he's been "Mr. We-Need-To-Regulate-This-Problem McCain". We know he promises to fix it "so it never happens again", but wouldn't it had been nice if he had learned his lesson during the 80's?

And we know he also wants to do the same thing to Social Security. DOES THIS SEEM WISE TO YOU? Experience without wisdom is nothing to brag about.