•  Campaign Videos (January 2012) « Newt 2012
  

Gingrich: We need to get our house in order and we need to vaccinate ourselves against foreign contagion.  The correct answer to the Euro is not to spend more American money propping up the Germans who prop up Southern Europe.  The correct answer is to figure out how we seal our banks off, how we make sure we protect ourselves, and then say to the Europeans, you have a problem and you need to solve it.

Part of our approach frankly ought to be to re-establish something Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and that is to have a commission on gold look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.  We need to repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Act.  We need to say to the Federal Reserve your only job is to maintain the stability of the dollar because we want a dollar to be worth 30 years from now what it's worth now because that optimizes savings and investment because people know what they're going to get back. 

This was the very purpose of founding the Constitution was land owners and property owners who did not want inflation and they felt that under the Articles of Confederation they were increasingly getting inflated paper money. 

And we need to go back— hard money is a discipline.  It means you can't just hide from your problems; you've got to solve them.  And you can't inflate away your difficulties, you actually have to work them away.  But I think it's very important for us to understand in finance that the entire contraption that has been built up over the last 30 or 40 years has so much paper in it, so much debt, so much leverage that we probably have a 15 or 20 year period of working our way out of it, and yet the alternative is to get sicker and sicker and sicker.

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Notes: From speech to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

Copyright © 2012 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.