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The Real Deal

So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

cards2468 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

cards2468 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

cards2468 wrote:looks like a lot of rhetoric.

What would count as not mere rhetoric? Preconceived notions about what Democrats do?

Thank you for contributing to the military discussion.

You stated that Obama would not invest in military technology but provided no evidence that this was the case. KyCardinalFan posted his platform that explicitly stated that he planed to do exactly that. This was dismissed as mere rhetoric but no counter-evidence was provided. It sounds to me like you have already made a conclusion (Democrats will not invest in the military) and will defer any need for evidence. This kind of inverted reasoning is a major problem with political dialog.

Well I guess the naval issue doesn't count.

It's simple, he's cutting taxes, and increasing spending in social programs including his national health care proposal. Unless he plans on dwarfing Bush's build up in deficit, he has to cut military spending. It's not that complicated.

clement wrote:

cards2468 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

cards2468 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

cards2468 wrote:looks like a lot of rhetoric.

What would count as not mere rhetoric? Preconceived notions about what Democrats do?

Thank you for contributing to the military discussion.

You stated that Obama would not invest in military technology but provided no evidence that this was the case. KyCardinalFan posted his platform that explicitly stated that he planed to do exactly that. This was dismissed as mere rhetoric but no counter-evidence was provided. It sounds to me like you have already made a conclusion (Democrats will not invest in the military) and will defer any need for evidence. This kind of inverted reasoning is a major problem with political dialog.

Well I guess the naval issue doesn't count.

It's simple, he's cutting taxes, and increasing spending in social programs including his national health care proposal. Unless he plans on dwarfing Bush's build up in deficit, he has to cut military spending. It's not that complicated.

Even if Obama ran up the national debt to the degree that you and John McCain are claiming that he will, it still wouldn't be dwarfing what Bush did. Under Bush the national debt has doubled. If you include the $700 billion more that is being added to our debt for the lending rescue package, he's closing in on $6 trillion of debt during his administration alone.

Obama is not cutting taxes, he is shifting taxes. He's proposing a tax cut to some people, while advocating a tax increase to others to offset it. You can't tax your way out of a recession, and we all know that. The incredibly irresponsible thing that Bush and Congress have done over the past 8 years is cut taxes and increase spending during economic prosperity. You only behave that irresponsibly when you are in a recession. When times are good you are supposed to start cleaning house and hopefully start creating some slack for when the next emergency comes along. In the 1990s we started to do that. But we weren't doing it before that, and we haven't been doing it since.

Since you are voting for McCain, can you tell me how he intends to deal with the debt and deficit? He is proposing cutting taxes for the wealthy and for small business while proposing no tax increases. Meanwhile his pledge of cutting spending is really rhetoric since he hasn't proposed one single significant cut in expenditures. In fact, he has already stated that he will not cut increases in spending in Medicare, Social Security, and the military. Those 3 areas alone already make up the majority of federal spending.

Now if you want to look at history to really see which presidents have been more fiscally responsible and which have been less, read this:

Lyndon Johnson (Democrat)
Increased Revenues by 25%
Increased Spending by 24%
Net % increase/decrease = +1%

Richard Nixon (Republican)
Increased Revenues by 17%
Increased Spending by 21%
Net % increase/decrease = -4%

Gerald Ford (Republican)
Increased Revenues by 11%
Increased Spending by 22%
Net % increase/decrease = -11%

Jimmy Carter (Democrat)
Increased Revenues by 20%
Increased Spending by 13%
Net % increase/decrease = +7%

Ronald Reagan (Republican)
Increased Revenues by 15%
Increased Spending by 25%
Net % increase/decrease = -10%

George H. W. Bush (Republican)
Increased Revenues by 17%
Increased Spending by 18%
Net % increase/decrease = -1%

Bill Clinton (Democrat)
Increased Revenues by 35%
Increased Spending by 9%
Net % increase/decrease = +26%

George W. Bush (Republican)
Increased Revenues by 10%
Increased Spending by 25%
Net % increase/decrease = -15%

To me, the most remarkable number in all of that is that under Bill Clinton spending only went up 9%. He and Carter were the least spendy Presidents over he past 40+ years, yet somehow the Republicans always warn us of how much Democrats love spending, and they use Clinton and Carter as their examples. It's a completely bogus and dishonest argument.

cards2468 wrote:I have no idea what McCain claims Obama will run the national debt to, I got those numbers from the head of the economics department here at SLU. They made a model that's based on his tax plan and McCain's tax plan, McCain comes out to a little more than $4 trillion added to the nat'l debt, Obama comes in just under $4 trillion, of course I suppose Obama could change this by not following through with his proposed tax cuts or by jacking them up after lowering them.

According to Michael McDonald's terrific website, there are three states in which early voting has already exceeded its totals from 2004. These are Georgia, where early voting is already at 180 percent of its 2004 total, Louisiana (169 percent), and North Carolina (129 percent).

Hmm ... can anybody think of something that those three states have in common?



The African-American population share is the key determinant of early voting behavior. In states where there are a lot of black voters, early voting is way, way up. In states with fewer African-Americans, the rates of early voting are relatively normal.

This works at the county level too. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland), which about 30 percent black, twice as many people have already voted early as in all of 2004. In Franklin County (Columbus), which is about 18 percent black and also has tons of students, early voting is already about 3x its 2004 total.

jim wrote:622 pages and nobody thought of this:

What does PECOTA say about these candidates?

clement wrote:Obama is not cutting taxes, he is shifting taxes.

GatewaySnayke wrote:Yes, the whole argument from the right blaming the CRA (and essentially minorities) for the collapse of our economic system is so absurd that I wonder how much lower they can go in finding new scapegoats for their failed policies.

Even if Obama wins, we are still a long ways away from improving race relations in this country.