ken, the piece i mentioned, you and carmen rinehart wrote almost a political piece about how the u.s.as doing. you said, look, compared with other big financial crises that meet the recessions, we're doing pretty well. fair? >> yeah. that's a fair characterization of what they said and what we said. i mean, it's fair game to say we can do better. we have a plan where the economy's going to grow better. but it you're going to evaluate what happened, was it a bad recovery, was it a good recovery, i think you have to compare it to deep financial crisis. this was not a plain vanilla recession. you have to compare it to deep financial crises we've had in this country which don't happen very often and other countries around the world, and if you go by that metric, the united states has not done so badly. i mean, i think part of the argument is they say, well, we're not growing that fast now. but the other side of the coin is we didn't fall that far at the beginning. i mean, what people are interested in is are we better off than we were four years ago. and not did we get a lot better in the

with all respect to carmen rinehart, who made major contributions, there's nothing magic about some particular the economy goes downhill. but we're in danger -- we have endangered ourselves by taking on escalating amounts of debt, which will keep going on in the future. we have to get our economy back recovering, growing faster, and we have to get our debt under control. that means our debt should not be growing faster than the economy. it's very simple. >> and what kind of progress have you seen on that in the past year since the u.s. credit rating was downgraded? i mean, here we are again at the 11th hour. the 11th hour talking about big changes, a lame duck congress presumably is going to have to work with a president who could be a new president and we don't have any clear signal of how to fix this. >> oh, i think we do. i served on the simpson-bowles commission. that was a bipartisan group and we came up with a sensible bipartisan solution. any solution to the rising future debt has got to include two things. slowing the rate of growth of medicare, medicaid, and social security. remember,

carmen rinehart nor i have been backing either of the advising but we felt since our work was being cited again and again and again, not just in op-eds but in press briefings that we heard from, we thought we had to set the record straight. >> fair to say we're doing pretty well compared to other countries in similar positions? >> well, we're better than the worst s. that good enough? that would be the question. what's interesting about what ken is saying is deep financial crisis, yes. it is part of a great pattern that he and carmen have analyzed and highlighted. however, our deep financial crisis, it sounds a little exonerating, doesn't it? deep financial crisis. nothing the average person could do about it. it has to do with political policy. for example, vis-a-vis housing. if our federal government hadn't guaranteed all housing everywhere both through fannie mae and freddie mac, the fha and so on, we would have had less of a crisis. the whole world believed in our housing. so i disagree just with the exonerating tone, this of the result of policy that voters supported that was erroneo