2014 NJ Senate debate: on Budget & Economy

Jeff Bell: Restore the gold standard

Bell: Strongly Agree.

Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.

Bell: Giving back control of our money from the Federal Reserve to the people by restoring the gold standard.

Murray Sabrin: Free enterprise is the key to national prosperity

Sabrin: Strongly Agree

Jeff Bell: Fed's zero interest rate policy extends Great Recession

"I offered an answer to that problem," he added. At the center of the economy's lackluster recovery, he said, is the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy, which he blames for the lack of job creation and for denying people the ability to save. The U.S. needs to undergo a "fundamental monetary reform," he said.

That belief is what prompted Bell to run again in the first place, he said. Since 1982, he has continued working on tax and monetary reform at a series of Washington DC-based think tanks and consultancies. "It just struck me that the whole cycle was going to go forward with no further debate on Fed policy unless I decided to come back to New Jersey and run," he said.

Murray Sabrin: Federal Reserve is one big scam

"That means having market-based interest rates, reducing spending to what the people will pay for in taxes so they don't have deficits, and freeing up the economy from the strangulation of regulations, which are now 80,000 pages in the Federal Register," he said. "For the average person who wants to start a business, they look at all the regulations that they have to go through and they say, 'I can't do this.'"

Cory Booker: We will not be able to cut our way out of the jobs crisis

We must act to empower those who are suffering now, removing roadblocks that prevent them and their families from getting back on their feet. Doing that is about more than simply protecting the most vulnerable or those at risk of falling from the middle class into poverty. It means providing help to people who are likely to spend the extra money they have in their paychecks every month--a hand up that will create benefits throughout the economy.

Jeff Bell: Return to gold-dollar convertibility now

"I'm a one-issue candidate," he says. "I don't really want to get into state issues. With no money, my only real opportunity is to be known for just one thing." So Bell, an eloquent and ardent pro-lifer, defense hawk, and foreign-policy interventionist, ties nearly every issue he's asked about back to the destructive power of paper money.

"Why is it so important to return to gold-dollar convertibility now?" his letter asked the unsuspecting Republican voters of New Jersey. "Things have gone too far for limited half measures to work." A return to the gold standard, he concedes, would of course result in higher interest rates, as the dollar sought its own level of value without direction from the Fed.