Al Gore at the Aspen Institute Forum

“Unnoticed in Washington and New York as the debt-ceiling debate was going on, the ratio of television advertisements was nine to one on the 'Don't-lift-the-debt-ceiling debate. Spending is the problem.' And now we're going to tip the country back into recession. It's absolutely insane,” Gore said. “Mark my words on this we became the greatest country on earth because we made better decisions than any other nation. And we made better decisions because we used shared consciousness-shared reality rule of reason best evidence democratic discourse free debate to figure out what's more likely than not to be the best decision here. It didn't always work but it worked a hell of a lot better. Since we adopted this new system we are making catastrophic decisions that have massive consequences. The Iraq invasion. What just happened with macro-economic policy. It really is extremely difficult.”