I know, Gail-Tz...
...Of course it was the Democrats who got us into this mess. It's always the fault of the Democrats, no matter how many conservatives occupy the White House or Congress or the Supreme Court. If Reagan ran up deficits, FDR must have been to blame. And if the stock market crashed under Bush, it was only because liberals didn't let Bush regulate Fannie Mae, even though conservatives despise meddling with the free market.
When some conservatives hear minorities complain about how hard life is, they tell them to stand up and take control of their destiny, instead of blaming dark forces. But when it comes to actual governance, such conservatives resort to the same pattern, even though they've been running things for most of the past 40 years. It's interesting, really.
But Gail-Tz, how exactly would you make the case that Bush and a GOP Congress are less to blame for events of this decade than the Dems?
Both parties are to blame. I think it's silly to focus on this decade alone when government spending has been spiraling out of control since the 1930s. Yes, the most significant spikes in federal discretionary spending - minus national security - occurred during the FDR, LBJ, and now Obama administrations, but it's equally fair to say that Republicans have lost their way.
We need term limits in Congress so that we can rid ourselves of the buddy-buddy system that incents every Senator and Representative to support most every pet project that comes along. And we somehow need to overcome the political unacceptance of "radical" solutions - privatizing social security, ending this absurd and unwinnable war on drugs, eliminating the Department of Education and other worthless bureaucracies - that are preventing us from righting the ship. What a shame that any politician who proposes some out-of-the-box solution is immediately demonized in the press and persecuted in their next campaign. Anyone who believes we can fix things merely by lowering taxes or spending gobs of money is exceptionally naive.
I'd say there's a lot there I can agree with. The first part is to share common blame for the problem, rather than keep playing the blame game.
Of course, both parties are to blame for the runnng, tab, Rob, but the housing crisis, which led to the collapse of the housing market and the collapse of the modern world as we know it, was brought on by your friends in the Democratic party.
True enough that liberal Democrats, eager to get relatively low-income individuals and families into "affordable" mortgages by any means possible, encouraged lenders to get into the subprime and Alt-A business. But was that truly enough to compel these same lenders to offer products that, theretofore, were deemed too risky and not worth their while? Maybe. But I'm not necessarily convinced there weren't other factors at play.
Perhaps having 1/2 of all the wealth of our country sitting in the pockets of about 4000 individuals is a bad thing. That these 4000 exert a measure of power way outside of their numbers is evident by the fact that they do not pay half the burden that is born by the 99.9915% when we pay taxes and by the fact that they have successfully pitted the middle-class against the poor in a class warfare that only serves to take the focus off their rapine accumulation of wealth and power. Their crumb grabbing underlings (bought cheaply by making them feel part of the wealthy class or possibly able to gain entrance to a minute portion of wealth) tend to trumpet the dogma of the right-wing politics of hatred for anyone who can't pull themselves out of the muck and mire of poverty, when the system they have constructed requires the maintenance of a permanent underclass. It is a rigged game and the ultra rich are always the winner.