I know we've primed the pump, but it would all be very interesting to us to know whether, if we could have simply ridden on the coattails of our major trading partners, we really needed to dive into this level of structural deficit again. I know it was an agreement amongst developed nations that we would all take part in this, but to me it seems such an irresponsibly scattergun approach to spending money.
Again, I'm not an economist, but the money was flying out the door. My whole political career has been spent in a period of belt-tightening and cutbacks and prudence and probity and pencil-sharpening. All of a sudden, all of that is out the window, and the conventional wisdom is the hell with balanced budgets; we were only kidding about that. We don't need balanced budget legislation, because clearly what you do when you get into trouble is spend as much money as you can.