Suddenly, with Barack Obama pitching almost a trillion dollars in new spending, leading Democrats see nothing wrong with deficit spending. Why? Because the rich will pay for it, silly! Barney Frank explains that spending tons of money we don’t have now will be no problem, because he knows where to get it:

I think at this point, there needs to be an immediate increase in spending, and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second, uh, a second seat. I do think this is the time for a very important kind of dose of [unintelligible]. Yes, I think later on, there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of rich people out there who we can tax at a point down the road to recover some of this money.

Frank has a large amount of chutzpah to talk about recovering money.  Frank and his cohorts in Congress ensured that we lost the money by blocking regulators from doing their jobs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Frank himself kept telling us from 2001 to this year that Fannie and Freddie were solvent and that there wouldn’t be a collapse — and so we didn’t need to toughen oversight over their business practices.

Look at Frank grin while talking about all of the rich people he’ll soak with new taxes if given the chance.  Frank loves his class warfare.  He’s one of the architects of this financial collapse, and now he wants to make sure that the collapse is complete by confiscating the capital that would correct it.  I’m not sure if he’s insane or just stupid, but neither makes me terribly comfortable while Frank remains chair of the Financial Services Committee.