the tindog coffeehouse

There’s some debate around the Interwebs about whether John McCain’s computer illiteracy makes him a less qualified presidential candidate. (The liberal blogs and tech blogs seem to think it does. No surprises there.)

Andrew Romano at Newsweek doesn’t think it matters:

For one thing, McCain’s computer illiteracy doesn’t reflect a lack of curiosity–it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain’s job in the U.S. Senate–where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers–has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary). When aides are responding to your messages and briefing you on every imaginable subject, the incentive to get online sort of disappears.

Secondly, even if McCain had spent some time surfing the Web over the last decade, it’s highly unlikely that he would’ve amassed enough technological expertise to single-handedly craft appropriate public policy responses to the “upheavals” mentioned above.

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According to financial disclosure statements filed by the two presumed presidential candidates, Barack Obama earned about $4 million dollars last year (mostly book royalties) while carrying no credit card debt. John McCain, meanwhile, earned about $340,000 but has a joint American Express account with a balance of $10,000-$15,000 with an interest rate of 25.99%.

Of course, you’re asking the obvious question: What would Andrew Jackson think about that?

I’m currently reading An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon. He points out Jackson’s quest to eliminate the national debt, which had “soared” to $125 million after the War of 1812.

Jackson had two purposes in ridding the country of debt. The first, of course, was that he thought debt was bad in and of itself. He had called it a “national curse” in his first run for the presidency in 1824. But he thought that the institutions and the people who benefitted from it were a national curse as well. “My vow,” he pledged, “shall be to pay the national debt, to prevent a monied aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country.”

And in fact, Jackson lived up to his pledge, reporting in his 1834 State of the Union address that “the country would be debt-free on January 1, 1835, and have a balance on hand of $440,000.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, now I know who I’m voting for in November! (Even if he has been dead for 163 years.)

The Consumerist has posted a great explanation of how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 led to the subprime mortgage disaster we see today.

The act, passed in 1933 in direct response to the factors that led to the Great Depression, provided several reforms, including establishing the FDIC and authorizing the Fed to regulate interest rates in savings accounts. The act also prohibited commercial banks from merging with investment banks. (Wikipedia article here.)

In 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed, which repealed the prohibition on commercial and investment bank mergers. As a result (per The Consumerist):

Now, on the one side they could sell mortgages to homeowners, and then invent fancy investment structures which they sold on Wall Street. Because they were “covered” on both ends, banks felt free to sell increasingly dicey mortgages, just so long as another sucker was picking up the garbage. This sucker was picking it up because he had a plan to repackage it and sell it to another sucker, and so on. Eventually we end up with no-doc stated income interest-only option-ARM no money down mortgages being repackaged as “sound investments” being sold as “stable assets” for city pension plans to park their money in.

Footnotes: As the comments in the Consumerist post point out, John McCain voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, and one of the authors of the bill, Phil Gramm, is McCain’s chief economic adviser. And another commenter (quoting Bloomberg) pointed out that Barack Obama had said that Glass-Steagall should not be restored.