Glenn Beck hosted an unusual show on Tuesday night, devoting large segments of the program not to personal sermonizing, but instead to hearing from two different experts with very different takes on the economy. Those two experts were economists Art Laffer and Richard Duncan, who managed to both take a very pessimistic view of where the economy currently is, while also offering diametrically opposed suggestions for how to improve it.

Broadly speaking, Duncan approached the issue from the Left, while Laffer approached it from the Right. However, those two descriptions don’t actually do the full clash of ideologies justice. Duncan argued that the choice of options for the United States government was threefold, and that policymakers could either 1) Revert to a balanced budget, which would contract the economy all the way into a depression, 2) Keep spending at the current rates and go bankrupt and hit a recession in 5-10 years, or 3) Keep spending at current rates, but use the money to invest in up-and-coming technology, rather than to pay off cronies or create shovel-ready jobs. Duncan favored the third approach, as you’ll see in the following video:

{http://web.gbtv.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=23101059&source=GBTV}

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