So now when you say "Bush's policy" just what exactly is that, and can you prove that it was one man's decision, or multiple decisions that caused or recession?
"Bush's policy" in this context typically refers to multiple policies of the Bush adminsitration, many of which were simply continuations of policies established by previous presidents, along woth others that were unique to Bush.
Honestly, Bush has received a great deal of teh credit for the economic disaster simply because it happened on his watch. He's not solely responsible, but he did little or nothing to prevent it, and his policies (whether of his invention or simply continued from other administratios) actively made the problem worse. As another President once said, "the buck stops here."
I need you to answer this question, as I still haven't heard one reasonable explanation of how one man could be responsible for so much. I haven't heard it from Obama, the liberal media or any other source. About the only thing I have heard is "the war". We just spent twice that in the past 6 months. Remember, the war coat us, but who did we spend it on? In principal, isn't similar to a stimulus package?
The money spent on the also had the effect of draining the public coffers and turining the federal
surplus that Bush started with into the largest
deficit the nation has ever seen. This is obviously not entirely Bush's fault, as it required Congress as well, but Bush and his administraton were the ones pushing for the war in the first place.
This massive federal debt was spent on an unnecessary war, when it would have been more useful
now as part of genuine economic stimulus plans. Bush's administration promoted
tax cuts during a time of war, an completely unprecidented and wholly
stupid position.
While a significant portion of the war money was spent on American companies for the manufacture of weapons and the reconstruction of Iraq, those expenditures do not happen in a vaccuum. When building a weapon, for example, there is profit involved, but the manufacturer must also use a significant portion of the purhase price for materials, labor, and research - not all of which is spent in the US. If 80% of the materials used in teh construction of a $5 million military plane are imported, claiming that the $5 million used in the plane's construction remained in the American economy is inaccurate at best and dishonest at worst. Clearly I pulled the specific numbers from nowhere, but the point remains.
Further, we
got nothing for our money, as opposed to infrastructure spending which would have spent money in return for goods and services of
lasting value. It's far less effective economically to spend $1 on a bomb to blow up a bridge in Iraq than to spend that $1 on maintaining a bridge in the US so that it doesn't collapse and cause further economic harm.
I am tired of the liberal media, Obama, and people like you just blurting out titles like "Bush's policies". The fate of a nation does not lie in the hands of one person, that's the way our government is set up. Or the fate of a world economy.
The media is not liberal. It's just not as far right on average as Fox News. America doesn't have much of a liberal presence compared to other nations; our Democrats, including Obama, are far more comparable to the
conservative parties of nations like Canada.
But I understand why you'd take exception to blaming everything on Bush - he
wasn't solely responsible for the economic meltdown. Unfortunately, the media is forced to condense all of their news (often including extremely complex stories like the causes behind the economic crisis) into not only an allotted timeframe, but also into something the average person can
understand without advanced degrees in the subject matter. Politicians have the same problems, but
more so, becasue the responses we hear from them are typically small soundbytes, not full reports.
As I said, Bush gets a lot of blame because it happened on his watch, and he did little or nothing to prevent it while several of his policies had an exacerbating effect. While the actual causes go far beyond Bush, he's become something of a poster child for the crisis because of the actions he took (and those he did
not take) that contrbuted.
I see our current situation as being one that has been building since 1950 with "household credit." The amount of household credit has gone up steadily since 1950, and exponentially in the last few years. It's time to pay up what's owed.
This is very true. Household debt has increased significantly, and while not all debt is "bad," in more recent years it's spiraled out of control.
Taking a loan for a house (when one has the ability to pay off the loan) is not "bad debt." In most cases it can be an investment where eventually the payoff will be larger than the interest you pay on the mortgage (the exception obviously being overpriced housing markets).
Taking a loan you have no ability to pay off while planning to take out a
new loan against an
assumed but not guaranteed higher home value in the future is "bad debt." This is one of the root causes of the crisis. In many cases mortgage companies broke laws to give out loans to people who had no ability to repay them. But many of the loans shouldn't have been legal
at all - "interest only" loans, for example.
A lack of regulation and oversight of the mortgage industry allowed people to accumulate huge amounts of debt they would never be able to repay. Bush's adminsitration bears
some of the responsibility for allowing these to continue - many people knew that this was a problem, and as President it was Bush's responsibility to make regulation and oversight a priority. He is, after all, the head of teh Executive branch, the branch of our government responsible for the
enforcement of our laws. His Justice Department should have aggressively attacked fraudulent lenders who fudged applications for unqualified borrowers. He should have petitioned Congress for better regulation of the industry in his State of teh Union address instead of ranting about a ridiculous "axis of evil."
This was just the first point at which intervention was possible. There were many others. Even teh FBI noted that trends in teh mortgage industry were becoming dangerous:
quote:
"We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt," the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. "Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism."
From
here.
The disproportionate fear of terrorism after Sept. 11 caused Bush's adminsitration to ignore a serious threat to the US - one that
actually threatens the existence of the nation as opposed to a collection of mass-murderers who have no ability to actually topple our way of life.
Spending more of our money, does not seem like a good answer to me, and many other people as well. It was foolish loans, and spending by the banks that caused them to crash, haven't we learned anything from them? How to we come up with 800billion when we have trillions in debt already?
Not all of the responses to the crisis have been very effective so far, and in many cases we won't know if they were effective for months or longer. But in very general terms, government spending
is a valid way to combat an economic crisis.
Take the example of the Great Depression. The current crisis doesn't follow quite the same pattern, but some lessons are stillv alid. Letting all of the banks close certainly didn't work well, for example. Trade protectionism made the depression worse and last longer. Government inaction simply allowed people to starve.
We finally found our feet again when the US government started spending and developing new programs to actually combat the problems. FDR's first order of business was to get the banks open again - and regulate them so that only
solvent banks could re-open. Massive amounts of money were spent on public works projects, much like the recently-passed stimulus package intends to do, to give jobs to the unemployed in exchange for lasting infrastructure improvements. The New Deal also gave us Socuial Security and other programs to help people who were suffering at the moment. This is parallelled by increasing available money for unemployment benefits, food stamp programs, and others that will help the poor actualy
survive the hard times.
Numerous studies have shown that federal stimulus spending is an
investment. For every $1 we spend on infrastructure and other programs, we get around $1.50 of economic stimulus. Tax cuts, by comparison, give around $.75 for every $1 of reduced tax.
Spending more of "our money" is actually a
good thing if done appropriately, and can return on the investment by restabilizing the economy so that long-term growth can resume.
Not only that, most of the world's economy is doing bad as well. And this is all because of Bush. I think you guys him more credit than what is due. I heard today from a Christian radio station, the leader of Crown ministries in the UK said that the UK is on the brink of financial collapse. and that the world as a whole is not doing well. The news also reports of stocks crashing around the world.
Many of the world's economic problems have actually been caused by the near-collapse of the American economy. We're the largest economic force int he world.
California alone is 8th. A great deal of the
global economy is tied up in American investments and exports to the US. What happens when the world's larges consumer nation can't afford to consume any longer?
What we're seeing now is a massive domino effect, and at various points in the chain where it could be stopped, policies are put in place to make it
worse. If Bush can be credited with a great deal of the American collapse, he can be credited with the global ramifications as well.
I believe it totally revolves around the huge credit, debt, cost of gas, cost of materials, and the greed of people who sell their houses (as well as the people buy them for ridiculous prices) that caused all this. This is a correction, and that's all it is, but it is a huge one, and many businesses are going to suffer.
The problem is that businesses are not all that suffers. In clinical terms, an economic correction of this magnitude is not necessarily "bad" becasue it can put the economy back into equilibrium and allow the development of new laws and regulations to prevent the illusory economic growth that required the correction in the first place, allowing more stable growth in the future.
Unfortunately, that's the "social Darwinism" perspective, and there's more to it than businesses and money.
Human suffering is what actually needs to be reduced, because economic upheavals like this cause suffering on a massive scale. The fall itself may be "good" for the economy in the long term, but we need to pad the fall so that we can retain as much stability as possible. Otherwise, people
die. What happens to an unemployed person who runs out of benefits but still cannot find work because half of the businesses in their city are gone?
The best and only real game plan is to create jobs and help those who need it most to survive through the hard times so that we can recover and begin the process of making sure that this doesn't happen again.
But never fear, Obama Hood is here!
Ah, a tiny reference to wealth redistribution in the form of mockery.
But guess what?
Rich people aren't suffering. They aren't in jeopardy of
starvation. Who suffers, not just a loss of money, but actually
suffers during an economic collapse?
Average people. The middle class and the poor. The people whose blood, sweat, and tears
allows the wealthy to continue to live in excess and priviledge. People who cannot afford their own healthcare, who literally
cannot survive being laid off without public assistance, people who have to choose between gas money and food instead of choosing to rent out their private jet.
Personal profit is not as important as reducing human suffering. CEOs do not deserve multimillion-dollar golden parachutes paid for by public bailout funds. The nation functions as a cohesive
society, and we all sign the social contract by participating in and reaping the benefits of that society. No wealth is made in a vacuum. This isn't a matter of "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor." This is a matter of paying for those very benefits of society that the wealthy have used to prosper, by giving other members of society those same benefits.
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