Bethany Mclean on Meet the Press

Here is a quote from today's Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: I want to quickly touch housing, Bethany. A lot of people believe that the economy will not begin to recover until housing prices truly bottom out. Should the government be in the business of either trying to bail out homeowners or reversing the slide in housing prices? Is that really a way to cleanse the economy?
MS. McLEAN: Well, I think the scary question here is what's the right level for housing prices, and can we--should the government be involved in determining that? One of the big issues with housing is that the, the price of a house has so radically outstripped the growth in income in recent years, and if you don't get that back into whack and you try to hold housing levels--housing prices at a level that is artificially high, I don't think you fix anything over the long term. You may address a short-term issue, which is that the continued decline in housing prices is going to be traumatic, but I think you've pushed the issue off for another day.

Ms. McLean also had another gem on the current Keynesian conventional wisdom infecting Washington.

MR. GREGORY: What's your big question about the stimulus plan?
MS. BETHANY McLEAN: Will it work, and how do we pay it back? We've gone from a few years ago the conventional wisdom was the economy's just--going to be just fine, housing isn't a problem. A couple of years ago it was the subprime problem is contained, this is only an issue of bad mortgages. Now the conventional wisdom is let's spend our way out of it. So as someone who's always a little bit terrified by the conventional wisdom, I'm terrified by that large question: How do we pay it back? What happens if it doesn't work?

I hope more people are thinking along the same lines.