Ivan Seeking said:
No one liquidated and we didn't lose another 50,000 jobs, plus the tens of thousands of jobs for suppliers, at the height of the crisis, which is what was on the horizon.
No different than what would have happened with what the Republicans were suggesting. Bankruptcy does not mean the companies must be liquidated. It's used as a restructuring technique.
Bernanke by no means believed the economy would heal itself. Being one of the foremost experts on the Depression, he feared that we were entering an unrecoverable depressionary spiral.
Which is why I credit his actions at the Federal Reserve.
Beyond that, capital injections are not going to hamstring an economic recovery. That is just silly.
No it isn't. That's one of the things economists have debated one another for decades. Because when you inject capital, you drive up the debt, and the driving up of the debt can hamstring the economy. It can hamstring it by crowding out private-sector investment, and it can also make people behave in ways they normally wouldn't because they can become fearful seeing the debt rise so much and thus cut back on their consumer spending for fear of future tax increases, while businesses can see the debt increasing and stop hiring people and stop making any major investments for the time being. In this sense, trying to stimulate by taking on debt is really no different than just increasing taxes.
I'm not saying all of that stuff
does happen, but that no one knows for sure.
And health care couldn't derail anything given that it hadn't even passed until the recovery was well under way.
Healthcare could have stalled the recovery because businesses may have been reluctant to hire or invest due to being unsure of how healthcare would turn out, and what it would cost them.
Again, this is very subjective, but all the uncertainty trying to pass healthcare created cannot have been good for economic recovery.
The Republicans were accused of fear mongering for their claims of a socialist agenda and a Government takeover of health care;
It is a form of a government takeover of healthcare. For government to control healthcare doesn't mean they need to literally nationalize the whole thing, they just need to control a crucial area of it, such as health insurance, which they will now. Controlling health insurance, to a good degree, gives the government control over the healthcare system.
pulling the plug on grandma and death panels, and claims of cutting benefits for the elderly, that were not being cut.
Obamacare draws $500 billion out of Medicare.
Beyond that, we already have rationing in the form of denials and unaffordable insurance, many people already have no choice for any form of health care, and we already see skyrocketing costs, much of which results from the lack of a single-payer system.
Part of the increasing costs are due to two single-payer systems we already have, Medicare and Medicaid. And the British system is single-payer, and it is has rationing and increasing costs as well.
Health care can be streamlined and the cost reduced but the free market has simply not led to that end.
In theory perhaps; in practice however, that is not necessarilly the case. And America's healthcare system is not free-market.
There are excessive expenditures for unnecessary technology, a ridiculous amount of paperwork that could easily be streamlined using modern electronics [what a concept!] for dozens of different payers, poor tracking of drugs and patient information that result in malpractice suits and human misery, and worst of all, too many people who don't participate in the system at all until they become a liablity.
I agree here, but I would not attribute all of that to any failure of the "free-market." I also would not think the government can necessarilly pull it off any better.
The housing bubble was only the tip of the iceberg. The real killer was relentless drive towards deregulation of the financial sector. That is what ultimately did us in.
Again, that is very debatable, and again, no one knows the precise answer. The SEC had Bernie Madoff handed to them on a silver platter and still didn't catch on to what he was doing. Europe never had a wall of separtion between their investment banking and commercial banks, and they did not have a crisis like we had.
Keep in mind also the policies of the Federal Reserve. In their trying to prevent economic malaise from the Dot Com bubble, they inadverdently helped fuel the housing bubble.
Just as has been pointed out, that the solutions to our economic problems are not simple talking-point answers, the causes of the economic problems are not simple answers either. Government regulators are not going to know how to allocate capital or make investments or decide the optimal amounts of risk and so forth either.
Clinton was guilty of being the best Republican the Democrats ever produced, and it was he and GWB that stripped the regulations that helped to create this disaster.
Clinton removed a regulation that Europe never had and Bush signed Sarbannes-Oxley, which increased regulation over the financial sector. I do not know of any major legislation to deregulate the financial sector President Bush passed.
Moreover, at the heart of this are Republican, free-market principles. In fact, looking back at the debt to GDP ratio, we see the long slide into debt, and the loss of the middle class for that matter, all started with Reagonomics.
You're wrong here. Keep in mind President Bush did not adhere to any Reagan or conservative principles, nor did his father. Reagan's tax cuts, which were meant for stimulative purposes, helped temporarily drive up the deficit, which then reversed itself as the economy literally roared back to life. Under Clinton, with the Republican Congress, we managed to reach a budget surplus.
The budget went back into deficit in 2000 with the bursting of the Dot Com bubble, but then President Bush and the Republicans, being the epitomy of big-government conservatives, decided to:
1) Cut taxes
2) Spend like drunken sailors
Which caused the country to run deficits it shouldn't have.
As for the middle-class, they have not been lost at all. We have seen a consistent increase in per-capita GDP over the years:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/GDP-Per-Capita.aspx?Symbol=USD
What has happened is that the general income of the middle-class is increasing.
Even when the financial systems were collapsing, we still saw the unwaivering conservative ideology of non-intervention, even if it meant letting the country, if not he global economy, fail.
Not among the sensible Republicans, among the ideologues who knew in the end the financial system would be bailed-out, but who otherwise wanted to huff-and-puff "SOCIALISM!" as they weren't the ones making the decisions, sure.
It seemed the ideology was more important than the country! Recall that the Republicans blocked the first effort to bail out the banks. The next day, in fact, in the next minutes, the market was in near freefall.
They may have stalled it initially, but they had time, and in the end, passed it.
Yes indeed, this crisis lands squarely in the laps of Republicans. More specifically, it is the result of Republican ideology and free-market principles.
That's your "ideology" talking there, not any established facts on the matter.
