I appeared earlier today on
MSNBC’s excellent though decidedly left-of-left-of-center
Melissa Harris Perry, talking about a range of topics
including the Euro-crisis. We’ll have a full tape of the show
eventually up at Reason, but in the meantime, here’s a writeup of
the show, which featured among others the Wash Post’s Ezra Klein
and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, by
Mediaite’s Frances Martel:

…in the business of chronicling cable news, a debate on
austerity and inflation is a pretty hard sell. In a world
of Jeremiah
Wrights and Sandra Flukes, the
Euro crisis is rather low on the personal drama scale. This
morning’s Melissa Harris-Perry shattered that
conventional wisdom, with The Washington
Post‘s Ezra
Klein and Reason‘s Nick
Gillespie going head-to-head on the woes of the
Eurozone and whether the nations should continue to spend money,
the sort of crosstalk-laden panel discussion
host Melissa
Harris-Perry had to interrupt to remind them to
keep the audience in the loop….

“Europe is in a bank run,” Klein began explaining, arguing that
the central question in Europe is “if Greece goes down… does it
spread?” Gillespie responded, noting particularly that “inflation
is not a good thing,” a point Klein disputed as not being always
true. Gillespie disagreed, calling the idea an economists’ dream
that “just a little bit of inflation so our money is cheaper” will
fix the economy, concluding “it never works out that way… inflation
always goes out of control.”

The Nation‘s Katrina
Vanden Heuvel jumped in then to declare that
“austerity has failed” in her mind, as the world is “witnessing
Britain which controls its own currency, and faring worse than the
Great Depression; debt is a greater ratio of GDP than it was before
the austerity programs.” This comment prompted some crosstalk on
the matter, as Gillespie argued the problem with the UK was that
they didn’t cut spending, not that they implemented an austerity
program. Harris-Perry then jumped in to remind her guests that not
all their viewers were that well-acquainted with the nuances of
European economics– “we start saying ‘inflationary, margins’ and
people just tune.”

The conversation continued, though, in the same vein: a debate
on whether it was spending or taxing led Europe to the point it is
today. Vanden Heuvel and Klein agreed almost completely that the
problem with Europe is a lack of spending at a crucial time;
Gillespie disagreed. “This is why Europe is in the toilet, because
they have an unrealistic and unsustainable economic model where
they’re going to keep spending and keep taxing,” he argued, a point
Klein called “not quite right,” arguing that more spending– which
European countries had not done to the extent required in his view–
would help. Despite being a fairly heated ten minutes over a topic
that rarely gets a turn at being dramatic on cable news, it ended
on a conciliatory note, with Victoria Defrancesco
Soto concluding, “austerity is needed, but to a
certain extent.”

Here’s a link
the MHP site at MSNBC.com, where the show can be viewed in
clips.