Hey Liberal Lefties: Only Two Weeks Left To Blame Bush

I have learned from bigsoccer and Air America and DailyKos that the President is absolutely 100% to blame for the economy when it's bad and there are no other factors at play....unless a Democrat is in charge and then you can just say the Republican before him created the mess....and when the economy is good with a Republican president and tax revenues increase after tax cuts you can obfuscate by saying things like "there are more people paying taxes so of course they are higher" (even though in actuality in 2005,2006 and 2007 tax revenues PER PERSON were higher than any during the Clinton years).

So in conclusion:

-The Housing Crisis is all George Bush's fault (even though you can trace large chunks of the housing crisis to Democrat policies* and Democrats Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were in charge of Banking and Housing when it all collapsed)

-Even though there is a housing bubble collapse the real culprit of the economic situation is George Bush's tax cuts (even though it's provably false)

-The 39 cent value menu at Taco Bell got me thru my college years in the 1990's.....Bush comes in and no more 39 cent value meal. Coincidence?


*Although I blame some of the moronic Democrat actions for the housing crisis, the Republicans share alot of the blame including Bush's idiotic push for home ownership....but ultimately the problem lies with people who didn't pay their bills. The idiots who signed mortgages and didn't comply with contract law is the number 1 problem of the housing crisis and no one should blame banks or the Government when THEY THEMSELVES agreed to the terms they couldn't live up to.

**The War in Iraq has dragged us deeper into debt and has devalued the dollar. Bush does take blame for that, although MANY democrats were accomlisses (sp?) in the Iraq war.

 

The big question is: what's Liberal Larry going to do?

 

I think bush's legacy will be defined by an inability to react to foreseeable calamaties.

Katrina is the most obvious and even his own advisers are now saying that his poor performance in the wake of the storm effectively limited the rest of his presidency.

Then you can lop on the housing crunch and the aftermath of the invasion in Iraq. I don't blame bush for the mortgage crisis but I do blame him and congress (both parties) for their inability to act when it wasn't exactly a secret what was going on. In Iraq, there were plenty of people offering their advice that the aftermath of the invasion would be much more costly and would require many, many more troops. I give bush credit for appointing Gates and getting patreus in the right spot, but both were moves that were about three years (or longer) too late.

Reagan was a smart man. He correctly identified the key concept for rating a presidency. Are you better off? Of course, you extrapolate that to the question of whether the country is better off as well. Bush leaves about the biggest domestic and international mess possible short of an all out war with Iran as well. Are these things his fault? Well, he certainly hasn't done enough with his power to address them -- his fault or not.

Ted, I agree with you to an extent on the fault of the borrowers, but I think it is not a complete picture. It is too simplistic to blame it on the lender as well because in most instances, there were no consequences to the initial lender at any given deal, so they didn't care.

In defense of the borrowers, many of them were not slackers, they were just too smart by half -- and I am talking about low income, middle income and high income purchasers. They took bad loans figuring that they would simply lock in a 30 year if there was upward pressure on rates. They should have realized that they might not be able to if their homes did not appreciate to give them some equity, but many did not. Foolish? A little. But there are hundreds of thousands of them that were not intending to fail in their contractual responsibilities but that ended up in a spot.

This was a brewing cesspool that screamed for more regulation. I have been saying for years now that lenders should have been barred from making loans where the total equity held was less than 20% unless the owner obtained and maintained mortgage insurance. That simple requirement would have saved us a world of hurt.

 

If you were a true capital C Conservative, you would not be such a fan of bush. Not only did he run up record deficits, he leaves office with the biggest shift towards socialism -- BEFORE Obama gets there -- that we have seen since the 30s. In addition, he leaves a floundering economy that has all but green lighted an additional trillion in spending that is necessary to simply keep us afloat and prevent a deflationary death spiral.

Bush had a decent argument that the economy had actually taken a turn before he got the job in 2000 but it was difficult for people to see relationship from the past year to the next -- until it is THIS fundamentally screwed up.

Now, everyone and their mother knows that Obama is inheriting a HUGE mess and one without precedent. We no longer have the manufacturing base in place to pull us out, so he needs to work on different models from the past. Even still, my guess is that he will get a very brief pass. I would say by the fourth quarter of this year, he will own the economic situation, good or bad, completely whether that is fair or not.

That's cool. Comes with the territory.

 

I disagree with alot of your assesments but be that as it may, the above quoted paragraph is what I want to address. In an ideal world with actual adults in charge of policies, no one should tell anyone how much money they can loan and who they can loan to and no on should regulate how much money someone can ask for.

But we don't live in a ideal world and we don't have adults running the government. In reality the borrowers deserve to be thrown out on the street and should blame THEMSELVES with no obfuscating or posturing or blaming. This is called responsibility, something we've moved away from in the this Country. Chris, those people signed their mortgage contracts. You as a lawyer should at least respect contract law, because these people didn't. It shouldn't go any deeper than the fact that these people agreed to rates and didn't live up to their end of the contract.

The Banks deserve to go under for making bad loans. Instead they cry to the government asking for tax payer money and then use some of that money to send their CEO's on resort trips.

So I guess I will agree we need regulation but not for regulations sake, we need it because we are dealing with children. And both parties have children running the show.

As far as reacting to what was going on, I'll say it again....if you want to blame Bush for not stopping the mortgage crisis then you have to put alot of blame on Frank, Dodd and Bill Clinton. Ron Paul screamed in front of congress in 1997 warning of this Crisis but no one listened and people on bigsoccer called him a kook (both republican and democrat). Ron Paul grilled both Greenspan in 2001 and Bernanke in 2006 about growing the money supply too fast and no one listened.

All of the Republicans and Democrats who ignored Ron Paul should be absolutely ashamed of themselves and if we the voters cared about actual issues like monetary policy, money supply, interest rates, trade deficits, etc then we could vote out all the Democrats and Republicans who have helped ruin this Country. We as a populace are ignorant and we vote in ignorant politicians. And then we take sides and we defend bad people on internet message boards. John Edwards is a bad person with bad ideas and wants to hurt America. George W Bush only cares about George W Bush and could care less the damage he did with the Iraq war and the amount of dead Americans and a huge debt he ran up which is being bought by China.

I am liking Obama more and more because he is adjusting his positions on the fly and it seems he is listening to his fiscal-conservative advisors, who just today praised tax cuts and said tax cuts may be needed to get us out of this hole. I may disagree with Obama on some things but he does seem openminded to new ideas on how to improve this country. Many Democrats and Republicans could learn from him.

 

This is true, Bush adhered to Austrian school economics only when it suited him. He even put tariffs on steel back in the early part of this decade. He pretty much made up his economic policies as he went along.

That's true and it's not cool. Which is sort of the point of this thread. Bush is taking blame for alot that is not his fault....yeah yeah I know he should have done something about the mortgage situation, but again (I sound like a broken record) the housing bubble can also be blamed on Clinton/Greenspan if you're going to assign blame to bubbles. Obama will take alot of blame for shit that ain't his fault too. It's ain't cool and it ain't right.

Herbert Hoover gets blame for the Great Depression and a two minute study of the policies of the time reveals the monetary policy was to blame and we repeated it in the 90's and 2000's leading us to now. The new deal by and large did not work (even though liberals love to think it did) and I think Obama is now recognizing that a new new deal isn't the answer. Good for him. I'm rambling now....

Obama needs all 8 years to straighten this out, if voters throw him out after 4 years it will be a shame.