Big Think

Jon Corzine: I’m Governor Jon Corzine, Governor of the great State of New Jersey.

Well, fiscal responsibility is a very important objective over the longer term.

Right now, we have, what I learned in Econ 101 back in my college days, we entered into a liquidity trap where people aren’t spending money. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. And right now, consumers are not spending money, banks are not lending money, people don’t have the confidence to move forward.

And we need an outside demand coming in to economic life. And I think that can only be the federal government. So, unfortunately, even though I believe, on the long run, we need to have fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, in the short run, we need to stimulate the economy.

We need for the federal government to fill in for what is not happening with the consumer, what is not happening by business spending. And that is only going to come from the federal government.

We need a very substantial stimulus coming in to the economy, I’d say, 2% to 3% of GDP to put you in the $300 billion range, might even be a little bit more to try to fill in the space that is occurring because our state governments, like New Jersey, are consumers, people on Main Street and businesses are not spending in the way that they would to keep the economy growing.

Recorded Nov 13, 2008.