The current state of our economy can't be blamed on just one person. A chain of events brought us to where we are now, starting with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) during the Carter years. Then, the Clinton Administration eased credit requirements under CRA even more during the '90's, pressuring Fannie Mae to approve mortgages to sub-prime borrowers.
In 2003, President Bush tried to reign in Fannie and Freddie's lax, risky lending policies, but was blocked by House Dems like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Maxine Waters, who all denied that there was any kind of "crisis" or problem with Fannie & Freddie.
After the financial defecation struck the rotary oscillator and things started going down hill in 2007-2008, President Bush didn't help the situation by signing the TARP Act into law and bailing out the failing banks. They should've been allowed to fail. The market would've corrected itself and the economy would've begun to turn around much faster than it is right now.
The bottom line is that our economy is in it's current state because of too much gov't intervention/meddling in the private sector. If you look back in America's history, our economy has been very cyclical, with times of prosperity and "panic" (the common term prior to the Great Depression). And when these panics happened, the economy righted itself with little to no gov't intervention, until the Great Depression FDR's New Deal. The New Deal programs didn't help, but rather prolonged the Great Depression, and our current gov't "solutions" (TARP, Stimulus, Jobs Bill, Health Care Bill, etc.) aren't helping our economy either. They were/are about one thing and one thing only: An opportunity for gov't to seize ever more power over the lives of private citizens.:angry:
<A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html">Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending</A>
<A HREF="http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=38135">Carter-Era Housing Policies Helped Spark Sub-Prime Crisis, Expert Says</A>
<A HREF="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-democrat-fingerprints-are-all-over-the-financial-crisis-949653.html">Democrat fingerprints are all over the financial crisis</A>
<A HREF="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3357">How FDR's New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People</A>
<A HREF="http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0508-25.pdf">The Government and the Great Depression</A>
<A HREF="http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx">FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate</A>
<A HREF="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123353276749137485.html">How Government Prolonged the Depression </A>
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