c-span: who is john maynard keynes? >> guest: john maynard keynes is probably the most influential economist of the 20th century although hayek is in the running. he's just not as loud and brash but he's the reason 30 is reused justification for a lot of government spending and dominated macroeconomic business cycle furies, theories of recession, depression for roughly 40 years until the 70's when things somehow went awry, the so-called phillips curve, the relation between inflation and employment wasn't holding the models that he the fever and 80s and 90s in the academy among academic economists. but they come in a big recession come he's back in favor again because he gives people an excuse to spend money in the name of saving things. so he is a huge figure. he had an outsize personality. we use his charm as part of the femur and the videos because he was a very charismatic man and very attractive to all kinds of folks who wanted to be around him. so we make canada more popular guy in the videos and hayek as always str

john maynard keynes and roosevelt chasing business, why don't you nationalize them or them alone.t is the use of chasing them around the lot every other week? so, he was always the trg -- tiger who scared business. but certainly he needed business to wage his war. and instead of being the enemy they were in the white house aluminum, not being prosecuted. making airplanes, making boats. making material for europe and the u.s. that was an important change because they knew they were allies of the government. that is an important feature in the recovery. in early 1941 wendell wonderful travels to london. how unusual is it for the democratic president to select his republican opponent. >> very unusual. he travels as a private citizen but carries a letter of introduction from roosevelt to churchill and he sees london when it has been badly battered. he goes to the cliffs of dover and sees the antiaircraft guns and gets a sense of what the war is for england and what the british are doing to stand against hitler alone. he brings that mental -- message back and makes a powerful case for

i think of it sometimes as the resurrection of john maynard keynes. can that he rest in peace? invoking his memory, this government has gone on an unprecedented spending spree in the misguided notion that somehow we can borrow and spend our way back to prosperity. by any measure, the spending has gone through the roof. one of the measures that is -- a telling, in 2007, total spending by the federal government is 19.7%. by 2009, it was 24%. that was a fully 25% increase in the size of the federal government as a percentage of our economy in a mere two years. i think that says it all. but let me say one more thing. what we have, what we're facing is not fundamentally a tax problem. as recently as 2007, the very tax rates that we have today, generated 18.5% of gdp. with revenue at 18% of gdp in 2007, we had a deficit that was almost trivial in size. it was 1.2% of gdp, a size that seems quaint by contemporary standards, right? that is a manageable number. and that is with the current tax rates. and the fact that taxes are not the problem that got us here is this. if you could doub