Marina v.N. Whitman is a professor at the Ford School and the Ross School of Business whose expertise is in international trade and investment. She has served as a VP and chief economist at GM and as member of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Transcript:
For a long time I've been saying that I didn't leave the Republican party, it left me! And then I thought about the fact that poll after poll has shown that a vast number of Americans want something much more in the middle, much more centrist than we get right now.
So I thought, well, what about an MM party -- a Moderate Majority party? The MM party would reverse this mindless business of sequester. We're cutting where we shouldn't be cutting, things that other countries are spending more money on, like research and infrastructure and education.
And we're not facing up to the need for trimming where we should be trimming. The benefits from social security and health care are going to have to be trimmed going forward, they're just going to eat up more and more and more of our total national income.
The MM party would work hard both to simplify the tax code and get rid of a lot of the loopholes that are in it now, it's not just that it makes it complicated, but because better off people benefit more from the loopholes than lower income people, getting rid of some of them would somewhat reduce the income inequality that is growing in this country at the moment.
The most important thing is for us to get our own ship of state righted, because the truth is that the longer our government is dysfunctional, the longer other countries are going to look somewhere else for guidance and leadership.