did everything exactly opposite to that, sunk us deeper into this hole. i tell you, you must have not just a cop on the beat and we put that cop back on the beat hopefully in the dodd-frank bill but also an aggressive cop on the beat. so we have written the laws now to get some regulation back into these markets to make sure that they are clean. and that people can rely on them. it s very important that people be able to rely on our markets and the damage that s been done to those markets has got to be corrected. i ve got to ask you a political question and i don t want to be partisan but how is it that the republicans and house of representatives have learned the wrong lesson from two years ago? how is it that they are going back immediately to a deregulatory philosophy, saying the same things that were said in the run-up to this crisis and trying to destroy and gut the law dodd-frank that you worked so hard to pass?
they re dumb. you re trying to put words in my mouth. the historical reference that we look at from the bush presidency is one where these tax cuts without corresponding cuts in spending which we had dick armey sitting here the other day and he said he would cut national endowment for the arts and not balancing a budget on that and fair point. okay? if that s the counterpoint, we are going to a deficit structure to take us over the cliff and more importantly all of these deficits that you are talking about were used to bail out the major financial institutions that took us over the cliff because of the deregulatory philosophy of president bush. the response is two fold. number one, from 1981 when the bush tax cuts were passed until reagan i mean, reagan tax cuts were passed until he left office, federal revenues doubled so the lower taxes didn t lead to less revenue. they led to more revenue. we had a spending problem. it wasn t that we didn t have
if that s the counterpoint, we are going to a deficit structure to take us over the cliff and more importantly all of these deficits that you are talking about were used to bail out the major financial institutions that took us over the cliff because of the deregulatory philosophy of president bush. the response is two fold. number one, from 1981 when the bush tax cuts were passed until reagan i mean, reagan tax cuts were passed until he left office, federal revenues doubled so the lower taxes didn t lead to less revenue. they led to more revenue. we had a spending problem. it wasn t that we didn t have enough revenue. number one. number two, to your point on dealing with the fiscal time bomb, everybody in washington knows that the elephant in the room is entitlements. we have $50 trillion in unfunded entitlements in social security and medicaid and medicare and do not add up. hold on. more fireworks in a second. we ll be right back.
now they claim to be doing this in the interest of the average citizen when they re doing it because of financial institutions and they happen to agree. so is this ideology, mr. frank, in the end when you sit down and argue with these guys in a markup with your get them eyeball to eyeball, do you sense on the other side they ve been tanked because they ve got campaign contributions or they have friends or do they take this laissez-faire attitude, even after all the hell we ve been through as a country? the dominant republicans are very conservative ones. they believe it idea logically. they also get some money for it. you ask people, look, alan greenspan admitted this in 2008. at least he admitted it that his total deregulatory philosophy was wrong. these are the people who said, don t regulate subprime loans. don t regulate derivatives. others said that, by the way and have now admitted they were wrong. this is an issue the market always nose best. and they have this one thing goi
they ve been tanked because they have campaign contributions or they have friends or do they take this laissez-faire attitude, even after all the hell we ve been through as a country is. the dominant republicans are very conservative ones. they get some money for it. you ask people, look, alan greenspan admitted this in 2008. at least he admitted it that his total deregulatory philosophy was wrong. these are the people who said, don t regulate subprime loans. don t regulate derivatives. others said that, by the way and now admitted they were wrong. this is an issue the market knows best and they have this one thing going for them politically. when they were in power for six years having both the congress and the president, you know, they so discredited the notion of government that they now benefit by saying you don t have the government do anything. thank you very much. u.s. congressman, chairman of the committee on banking, barney frank from massachusetts. up next, we re going