Are "we" spending too much?

doesn't really matter cause guess who took those loans from

. From 2003 to 2007 the amount of subprime loans had increased a whooping 292% from 332 billion to 1.3 trillion.

so your claiming Clinton, a man who saw peoples house value go up, is responsible for all the fucked up mistakes Bush made. hahahahah


get a fucking grip Farmer your looking silly, ya lets play the typical republican game and pretend Bush never existed and its all Clinton and Obamas fault.

Where did I make a single post about bush or Clinton. I asked a question. Agreed with part of your answer. Then asked a follow up.

To me it looks like your spazzing out about stuff I didn't say.

because is clear what you are trying to imply. Heres another nice little article.


Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of home ownership, Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, "faced with the prospect of a global meltdown" with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how the United States got here is partly one of Bush's own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own homes with his conviction that markets do best when left alone. Bush pushed hard to expand home ownership, especially among minority groups, an initiative that dovetailed with both his ambition to expand Republican appeal and the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Bush chose to oversee them - an old school buddy - pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

As early as 2006, top advisers to Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn. As recently as February, for example, Bush was still calling it a "rough patch."

The result was a series of piecemeal policy prescriptions that lagged behind the escalating crisis.

"There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems," said Al Hubbard, Bush's former chief economic adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. "Had we, we would have attacked them."

Looking back, Keith Hennessey, Bush's current chief economic adviser, said he and his colleagues had done the best they could "with the information we had at the time." But Hennessey did say he regretted that the administration had not paid more heed to the dangers of easy lending practices.

And both Paulson and his predecessor, John Snow, say the housing push went too far.

"The Bush administration took a lot of pride that home ownership had reached historic highs," Snow said during an interview. "But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost."

For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security, a government retirement and disability benefits program. The housing market was a bright spot: Ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

Lawrence Lindsay, Bush's first chief economic adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Bush meet housing goals.

"No one wanted to stop that bubble," Lindsay said. "It would have conflicted with the president's own policies."

Today, millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, home ownership rates are virtually no higher than when Bush took office, Fannie and Freddie are in a government conservatorship, and the bailout cost to taxpayers could run in the trillions of dollars.

As the economy has shed jobs - 533,000 last month alone - and his party has been punished by irate voters, the weakened president has granted his Treasury secretary extraordinary leeway in managing the crisis.

Never once, Paulson said in a recent interview, has Bush overruled him. "I've got a boss," he explained, who "understands that when you're dealing with something as unprecedented and fast-moving as this, we need to have a different operating style."

Paulson and other senior advisers to Bush say the administration has responded well to the turmoil, demonstrating flexibility under difficult circumstances. "There is not any playbook," Paulson said.

The White House issued an unusually extensive, and highly critical, response to The Times article on Sunday, saying that it had shown "gross negligence" in its reporting and that the story "relies on hindsight with blinders on and one eye closed."

"The Times's 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view," the statement said.

In recent weeks Bush has shared his views of how the nation came to the brink of economic disaster. He cites corporate greed and market excesses fueled by a flood of foreign cash - "Wall Street got drunk," he has said - and the policies of past administrations. He blames Congress for failing to reform Fannie and Freddie.

Last week, Fox News asked Bush if he was worried about being the Herbert Hoover of the 21st century. "No," Bush replied. "I will be known as somebody who saw a problem and put the chips on the table to prevent the economy from collapsing."

Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room. It was June 17, 2002, a day West recalls as "the highlight of my life." Bush, in Atlanta to introduce a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime.

West had patrolled there as a police officer, and now he was the proud owner of a $130,000 town house, bought with an adjustable-rate mortgage and a $20,000 government loan as his down payment - just the sort of creative public-private financing Bush was promoting.

"Part of economic security," Bush declared that day, "is owning your own home."

A lot has changed since then. West, beset by personal problems, has left Atlanta. Unable to sell his home for what he owed, he said, he gave it back to the bank last year. Like other communities across the United States, Park Place South has been hit with a foreclosure crisis affecting at least 10 percent of its 232 homes, according to Masharn Wilson, a developer who led Bush's tour. "I just don't think what he envisioned was actually carried out," she said.

Park Place South is, in microcosm, the story of a well-intentioned policy gone awry. Advocating home ownership is hardly novel; Bill Clinton's administration did it, too. For Bush, it was part of his vision of an "ownership society," in which Americans would rely less on the government for health care, retirement and shelter. It was also good politics, a way to court black and Hispanic voters.

But for much of Bush's tenure, government statistics show, incomes for most families remained relatively stagnant while housing prices skyrocketed. That put home ownership increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers like West.

So Bush had to, in his words, "use the mighty muscle of the federal government" to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.

Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Bush persuaded Congress to spend as much as $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs.

And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for government insured mortgages with no money down. Republican congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view.

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. "Corporate America," he said, "has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place."

And corporate America, eyeing a lucrative market, delivered in ways Bush might not have expected, with a proliferation of too-good-to-be-true teaser rates and interest-only loans that were sold to investors in a loosely regulated environment. But Bush populated the financial system's alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.

The president's first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission promised a "kinder, gentler" agency. The second was pushed out amid industry complaints that he was too aggressive. Under its current leader, the agency failed to police the catastrophic decisions that toppled the investment bank Bear Stearns and contributed to the current crisis, according to a recent inspector general's report.

As for Bush's banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry. When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks.

The administration won that fight at the Supreme Court. But Roy Cooper, North Carolina's attorney general, said, "They took 50 sheriffs off the beat at a time when lending was becoming the Wild West."

The president did push rules aimed at requiring lenders to explain loan terms more clearly. But the White House shelved them in 2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block confirmation of his new housing secretary.

In the 2004 election cycle, mortgage bankers and brokers poured nearly $847,000 into Bush's re-election campaign, more than triple their contributions in 2000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The administration did not complete the new rules until last month.

Today, administration officials say it is fair to ask whether Bush's ownership push backfired. Paulson said the administration, like others before it, "over-incented housing."

Hennessey put it this way: "I would not say too much emphasis on expanding home ownership. I would say not enough early focus on easy lending practices."

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.






Another answer to your question is Bush, and Ryan and other people in the Republican party don't believe in regulating a damn thing, which led to this whole fucking mess, guess who has continued to be against regulation????? Your man, Mitt and Paul.

or much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security, a government retirement and disability benefits program. The housing market was a bright spot: Ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

Lawrence Lindsay, Bush's first chief economic adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Bush meet housing goals.

"No one wanted to stop that bubble," Lindsay said. "It would have conflicted with the president's own policies."

Birdofthad wrote:

no your not getting it, the economy had collapsed, GM was on the verge of dying. Banks couldn't loan money because the housing market had collapsed, which the banks were heavily tied too.

Lets not forget all of this happened under Bush.
Mitt Romney suggested we let GM go into bankruptcy in a time when no banks would have loaned the money to keep the company and 2 million jobs afloat.

Obama followed through with the only logical thing to do and extended the Bush bailout, his auto bailout saved the industry, have fun attacking that and supporting the guy who said we should have let GM die.

Oh ya about that Bail out, and TARP, guess who voted for all of that, guess who took those funds gladly ?

Paul Ryan.

I dont care about Paul Ryan that had nothing to do with my statement or question to you

Is it ok for government to step into free trade and essentially decide to or not to bail them out with taxpayers money? Picking winners in a capitalistic setting is a contradiction yes??

Birdofthad wrote:

so your claiming Clinton, a man who saw peoples house value go up, is responsible for all the fucked up mistakes Bush made. hahahahah


get a fucking grip Farmer your looking silly, ya lets play the typical republican game and pretend Bush never existed and its all Clinton and Obamas fault.

http://factcheck.org/

Bill Clinton (Sept. 24): Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn’t signed that bill. …You know, Phil Gramm and I disagreed on a lot of things, but he can’t possibly be wrong about everything. On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I’d be glad to look at the evidence. But I can’t blame [the Republicans]. This wasn’t something they forced me into.

⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full transcript ⬏

No, Blame the Democrats!

The McCain-Palin campaign fired back with an ad laying blame on Democrats and Obama. Titled "Rein," it highlights McCain’s 2006 attempt to "rein in Fannie and Freddie." The ad accurately quotes the Washington Post as saying "Washington failed to rein in" the two government-sponsored entities, the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"), both of which ran into trouble by underwriting too many risky home mortgages to buyers who have been unable to repay them. The ad then blames Democrats for blocking McCain’s reforms. As evidence, it even offers a snippet of an interview in which former President Clinton agrees that "the responsibility that the Democrats have" might lie in resisting his own efforts to "tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." We’re then told that the crisis "didn’t have to happen."

It’s true that key Democrats opposed the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which would have established a single, independent regulatory body with jurisdiction over Fannie and Freddie – a move that the Government Accountability Office had recommended in a 2004 report. Current House Banking Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts opposed legislation to reorganize oversight in 2000 (when Clinton was still president), 2003 and 2004, saying of the 2000 legislation that concern about Fannie and Freddie was "overblown." Just last summer, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd called a Bush proposal for an independent agency to regulate the two entities "ill-advised."

But saying that Democrats killed the 2005 bill "while Mr. Obama was notably silent" oversimplifies things considerably. The bill made it out of committee in the Senate but was never brought up for consideration. At that time, Republicans had a majority in the Senate and controlled the agenda. Democrats never got the chance to vote against it or to mount a filibuster to block it.

By the time McCain signed on to the legislation, it was too late to prevent the crisis anyway. McCain added his name on May 25, 2006, when the housing bubble had already nearly peaked. Standard & Poor’s Case-Schiller Home Price Index, which measures residential housing prices in 20 metropolitan regions and then constructs a composite index for the entire United States, shows that housing prices began falling in July 2006, barely two months later.
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.

–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson

What you fail to acknowledge is that Bush took a good Clinton idea and fcking bungled it beyond repair (Bush's). Respond to the double post I made and bolder that shows How much Bush expanded.
Republicans like to talk about fiscal responsibility and small government but their politicians do otherwise.

Birdofthad wrote:

Im against someone who has taken 100's of millions of dollars out of the country, trying to tell me I need to pay 2,000 more in taxes while he gets another tax break.

Sorry thats the problem I have with Mitt Romney, add in he won't even show us his tax returns. Im not poor and sorry I get upset when millionaires try to cheat americans out of money by lying about their house value.

Romney did release his 2010 tax records( and an estimate on 2011).

Fact: he gave 3 million dollars to charity

Fact: Obama gave 250,000

Fact: that is the 14 % allowed to charity deducted on taxes

Fact: paid capital gains taxes which are 15%

Both candidates have rich people problems both gave 14% to charity to effectively lowered their taxable income .

Cu Bu wrote:

Birdofthad wrote:

no your not getting it, the economy had collapsed, GM was on the verge of dying. Banks couldn't loan money because the housing market had collapsed, which the banks were heavily tied too.

Lets not forget all of this happened under Bush.
Mitt Romney suggested we let GM go into bankruptcy in a time when no banks would have loaned the money to keep the company and 2 million jobs afloat.

Obama followed through with the only logical thing to do and extended the Bush bailout, his auto bailout saved the industry, have fun attacking that and supporting the guy who said we should have let GM die.

Oh ya about that Bail out, and TARP, guess who voted for all of that, guess who took those funds gladly ?

Paul Ryan.

I dont care about Paul Ryan that had nothing to do with my statement or question to you

Is it ok for government to step into free trade and essentially decide to or not to bail them out with taxpayers money? Picking winners in a capitalistic setting is a contradiction yes??

Cu Bu wrote:

Birdofthad wrote:

no your not getting it, the economy had collapsed, GM was on the verge of dying. Banks couldn't loan money because the housing market had collapsed, which the banks were heavily tied too.

Lets not forget all of this happened under Bush.
Mitt Romney suggested we let GM go into bankruptcy in a time when no banks would have loaned the money to keep the company and 2 million jobs afloat.

Obama followed through with the only logical thing to do and extended the Bush bailout, his auto bailout saved the industry, have fun attacking that and supporting the guy who said we should have let GM die.

Oh ya about that Bail out, and TARP, guess who voted for all of that, guess who took those funds gladly ?

Paul Ryan.

I dont care about Paul Ryan that had nothing to do with my statement or question to you

Is it ok for government to step into free trade and essentially decide to or not to bail them out with taxpayers money? Picking winners in a capitalistic setting is a contradiction yes??

Welcome to the club. Bird, doesn't get it.

Cu Bu wrote:

Cu Bu wrote:

Birdofthad wrote:

no your not getting it, the economy had collapsed, GM was on the verge of dying. Banks couldn't loan money because the housing market had collapsed, which the banks were heavily tied too.

Lets not forget all of this happened under Bush.
Mitt Romney suggested we let GM go into bankruptcy in a time when no banks would have loaned the money to keep the company and 2 million jobs afloat.

Obama followed through with the only logical thing to do and extended the Bush bailout, his auto bailout saved the industry, have fun attacking that and supporting the guy who said we should have let GM die.

Oh ya about that Bail out, and TARP, guess who voted for all of that, guess who took those funds gladly ?

Paul Ryan.

I dont care about Paul Ryan that had nothing to do with my statement or question to you

Is it ok for government to step into free trade and essentially decide to or not to bail them out with taxpayers money? Picking winners in a capitalistic setting is a contradiction yes??

CHURCH!

where were you fiscal conservatives from 2000 to 2008

and yes Cubua it is pom for the government to step in a bailout failed companies

George Bush started the process because he knew we would have crashed over the fiscal cliff if we didn't. Your argument is asinine. I guess we should have let the country fail

Birdofthad wrote:

where were you fiscal conservatives from 2000 to 2008

Bitching about deficient spending when the war wasn't at its peak.

Birdofthad wrote:

and yes Cubua it is pom for the government to step in a bailout failed companies

George Bush started the process because he knew we would have crashed over the fiscal cliff if we didn't. Your argument is asinine. I guess we should have let the country fail

So you were pro Bush on that?

yes anyone with a brain realizes that the bailout had to happen..

You realize the stock market had crashed and was 800, some of our biggest banks were in the shitter and our biggest auto maker was on the verge of complete collapse.

so you were with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on that?

Birdofthad wrote:

yes anyone with a brain realizes that the bailout had to happen..

You realize the stock market had crashed and was 800, some of our biggest banks were in the shitter and our biggest auto maker was on the verge of complete collapse.

Guess I'm brainless. Do you think the government will give me a bailout when I blow on my money irresponsibly due to pressure from others?

ask Bush, he's the one who created this mess.

double post

Farmer1906 wrote:

Birdofthad wrote:

and yes Cubua it is pom for the government to step in a bailout failed companies

George Bush started the process because he knew we would have crashed over the fiscal cliff if we didn't. Your argument is asinine. I guess we should have let the country fail

So you were pro Bush on that?

Another unaswered question.

Birdofthad wrote:

so you were with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on that?

They had differences stances, bro.

Just me and Obama on treatment and seasoning of dogs.

lol bird can you admit that you're a socialist? You want the size and power and reach of government to exponentially grow till no end and you think that will solve everyone's problems? I think you've read the Communist Manifesto one too many times man.

and can we please differentiate real liberals from socialists. Obama and Bird a like are not liberals, they are not democrats. They are socialists. The believe in the state before the people. The government will dictate all aspects of your life so that we are all "equal" ie: equal slaves to the state. He tries to bash libertarians and conservatives (and im not saying Romney is either one of those) because he knows that if he didn't, he would be supporting freedom and individual liberty. As we all know, there is no room for the rights of an individual in a socialist society. Individuality is not recognized as everyone is expendable for the good of the state. And certainly as evident by Obama's continued assault on civil liberties, the rights of the individual are meaningless. There is no point in trying to get people who believe in this philosophy to understand a concept like and individual should have unalienable rights that can not be violated by the government, no matter how much better off the "group" (state) will be.

Farmer1906 wrote:

Farmer1906 wrote:

Birdofthad wrote:

and yes Cubua it is pom for the government to step in a bailout failed companies

George Bush started the process because he knew we would have crashed over the fiscal cliff if we didn't. Your argument is asinine. I guess we should have let the country fail

So you were pro Bush on that?

Another unaswered question.

Birdofthad wrote:

so you were with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on that?

They had differences stances, bro.

Just me and Obama on treatment and seasoning of dogs.

no they didn't, Paul Ryan was for the bailout and sent 3 letters asking for bailout funds.

Mitt Romney was for most of the bailout, just not on bailing out GM. (a really fucking weird stance)

George Bush started the bailout and said it was an emergency bailout and that another larger one would need to be implemented after the election.