Gingrich: “soap opera” of debt debate accomplished little (audio)

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich suggests today’s precipitous decline on the Dow is “very worrisome.”

“As long as we stay with Obama’s bureaucratic socialism and we stay with Obama’s class warfare, we’re going to have a very bad economy and what we have to worry about is when you have a president who is undermining jobs and the economy, if we a serious shock from Europe or the Middle East, you could see us go into a second, deeper depression and I think that’s very worrisome,” Gingrich said this evening in answer to a question I posed about today’s Dow decline. “I mean, it began to hit me about seven weeks ago that this was not going to recover and that means you’re fragile and we could go down further.

“…My message all this weekend is going to be that every American should say to their congressmen and their senators that the number one thing you need to do when you go back in September is work on jobs for real — not just p.r. gimmicks, not just bus tours.”

Gingrich advocates a four-part plan: repeal the Dodd/Frank Act; open up American energy production; replace the EPA with the “Environmental Solutions Agency” Gingrich first proposed in January; and “dramatically restrain” the NLRB.

I asked a follow up, basically asking if today’s Dow drop is related to the debt deal, or to the long-term economic performance of important sectors of the economy.

“The market’s been decaying for 10 days. I think what the market’s doing is telling you is that nothing that was done in this entire ‘soap opera’ makes any difference to the long-term trajectory,” Gingrich said in reply. “They don’t believe the numbers. They don’t believe the agreement. It was probably good to have avoided default, but it didn’t accomplish anything positive. It accomplished the negative achievement, ‘We didn’t default,’ and I think that’s a real challenge.”

Audio of the brief Q&A with Gingrich.