Complete Transcript.
BARTIROMO: We are in a financial crisis, clearly. We are expecting further layoffs and further banks to go belly-up. Why should the American people believe and feel that the two of you have your hands on the wheel and can take us out of this?
Sen. McCAIN: Well, because we have a plan of action to get America's economy going again, Maria, and it has to do with a wide range of prescriptions. But one of them is to keep people in their homes. Look, it was the housing crisis that started this, OK? Fannie and Freddie, this--was the catalyst that blew this whole thing up. And frankly, the administration is not doing what I think they should do, and that's go in and buy out these bad mortgages, give people mortgages they can afford, stabilize home values and start them back up again. They did that during the depression, it was called the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We got to keep taxes low, we got to cut spending, we got to find alternative fuels, including offshore drilling and nuclear power. And we have to have a positive agenda for job creation. But I'd like to start with keeping people in their homes.
BARTIROMO: So, over the short term your plan is to keep people in their homes and buy those mortgages.
Sen. McCAIN: Create...
BARTIROMO: Over the longer term?
Sen. McCAIN: Over the longer term, as happened in the, by the way, during the Great Depression, was that over time money came into the Treasury. Obviously we have to stabilize our financial institutions, we have to unfreeze credit. How do you do all that? You create jobs in America. And we can do that in a broad variety of ways, and one of them is to stop this $700 billion transfer to countries that don't like us very much. Now, I know the price of oil is down temporarily, and that's reflective of a lot of conditions in the world. But we still have to free ourselves of our dependence on foreign oil, because over time it's still a finite resource.
BARTIROMO: Governor Palin, what about that? Now oil's around $60 a share--a barrel. Is it still an important issue to become energy independent? And how do you do it?
Gov. PALIN: Now is our opportunity to seize this and to be able to invest in the domestic solutions that are here now for that offshore drilling that is safe and responsible, for the nuclear that we need to tap into and the alternative sources. And yeah, drilling for the sources that we know are here and flowing that natural gas in the pipelines that we're building up there in Alaska, also. Now is the opportunity that we have, and we better seize it.
We cannot lull ourselves into this false sense of security just because the price of a barrel of oil today is 64 bucks, it's about half of what it had been I think even when we were speaking last, Maria. But no, now's our opportunity. The domestic solutions that are there, we tap into them, we become less and less beholden then on foreign sources of energy, and we circulate, as he says, these hundreds of billions of dollars a year in our own country, creating jobs for America.
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