The CNBC Debate

By now everyone's blogged and offered their opinion on last night's debate. I thought as a whole they tended to present better as a group than in the past. There were fewer questions about the war so less of them sounding completely out of it and falling all over themselves to say how well the surge was working. Thompson gets best idea of the night for indexing Social Security benefits to wages instead of inflation. I'm not sure that's the way to go. Some people actually do live on Social Security alone and that's a bit hit. But it at least addresses some of the long-term problems without going back to Bush's partial-privatization plan. In any event, Medicare is the bigger problem. All the homages to free trade were predictable. I think John McCain didn't understand the question about private equity being taxed at a lower rate. And while everyone bitched about Chinese currency manipulation, no one really had a good plan to get the Yuan up there. There's was lots of chiding of Democratic spending but all those Republican tax cuts last night mean a lot of spending, too. I like Ron Paul's libertarian rants about monetary policy even though they're about as sensible as his ideas about allowing guns on airplanes. For sheer appearances, Romney still presents the best but Rudy does well, too, and so did Fred who looked at his notes often but seemed like less of an empty suit than one might have expected.