I can say that
Posted By: KimMT40 on 2009-02-07
In Reply to: I do believe that - sm
This mess started well before Bush or Obama. The first sign of trouble was the huge trade imbalance we had with Japan years ago. At least then, some people - including some in government - had the smart idea of threatening quotas on imports - OR the option of building the cars here, which the Japanese started to do. That provided jobs via private industry, yet still allowed for competition.
It is not merely the mortgage problem that ails our economy. It is the downward pressure on wages from cheap foreign labor and illegal domestic labor - while our costs have remained high. People borrowed money they didn't have, hoping that things would get better, and of course they haven't.
Why did the "crisis" not appear until the last few months of Bush's administration? He didn't hand out excessive pardons as some leaders do, he wrote out billions to his Wall Street buddies at our expense and zero oversight. Do you really believe people in government did not see it coming? Haven't we been deluged for months, no years, with commercials on TV and junk mail about refinancing homes to pay off credit card debt? How many times did the Suze Ormans of the financial advice world warn that people shouldn't do that - because they would only run up more debt and end up losing their homes?
Where was Bush while this was building up? Was he even aware of what was going on? I do believe that he is "decent" in that there is good in everybody, but he is either lazy/incompetent or both in allowing billions to be written with no oversight. Obama has jumped out the gate - assembling a team well before he even took office to study the matter and get on it right away. He is not a slacker.
I know people griped about some of the money in the programs, but keep one thing in mind - as many of us on this board are women - that a lot of those programs would create jobs that women would be more likely to fill - in education and health care - and the ones that Republicans want to cut out of the bill. He started out focusing on alternative energy jobs, but some women's groups approached the administration and asked that a stimulus plan to create jobs should not be so lopsided in creating mainly male-dominated job opportunities. What is so disheartening is that people tune into Rush and Fox, soak up the angry rhetoric, and miss out on what these programs could accomplish - more jobs for women, or plans to help people stop smoking - which would reduce healthcare costs for our country? An ounce of prevention (stopping smoking) is worth a pound of cure.
People want to give Bush credit for "keeping America secure". How secure are we going to be if our economy collapses? We will not be able to maintain our military strength anymore than the Soviet Union could when their economy tanked. Bush paid attention to one leg of this stool but ignored the others. We all are paying for that and will be paying for that for decades to come.
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