“What we end up arguing about most of the time has to do with very specific priorities in which goods that everybody acknowledges are legitimate need to be paid for and we don’t have enough money.”
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 6, 2003.
Then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama joins this 2003 panel discussion on public spending. Panel members discuss the nature of public spending, from its very constitutionality to the interplay of execution and interest in the public good. Can we afford expanded health care, national defense, education, and “nation building” along with stimulative tax cuts? How should government balance market efficiency with the desire for social equity as a public good? A panel of distinguished experts considers both sides of the spending issue. Participants also include William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute; John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist and social commentator; D. Cameron Findlay, Aon general counsel and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor; James Nowlan, director at University of Illinois’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs; and others. Michael Moskow, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, moderates.
