The Obama Economy: Bovine Fecal Matter On Ice

Well, the good news is that the unemployment rate went down to a seven-year low for Obama to 5.3%  Surely Obama must be doing an awesome job, Democrats say.

Okay.  Obama’s BEST MONTH EVER statistic-wise matches the EIGHT-YEAR AVERAGE for the Bush presidency that Democrats say was terrible. Although, technically, Bush’s average unemployment rate of 5.27% is still BETTER than Obama’s best month EVER.

During the 8 years of the George W. Bush Presidency the lowest annual unemployment rate was 4.61% in 2007, the highest annual unemployment rate was 5.76% in 2008. During Bush’s 8 years as President the average unemployment rate  was 5.27%

Which is another way of saying that “Democrat” and “disgusting, dishonest, pathological hypocrite” may not rhyme, but they sure mean the same thing.

The mainstream media are pathological hypocrites, for sure.  You can take a trip down memory lane and compare how they compared unemployment numbers even when they were BETTER for the Republican presidents.

The bad news is that twice as many people just gave up looking for a job as actually GOT a job this month.

The bad news is that Obama set another record.  And not in any good sense:

Record 93,626,000 Americans Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Declines to 62.6%
By Ali Meyer | July 2, 2015 | 8:42 AM EDT

(CNSNews.com) – A record 93,626,000 Americans 16 or older did not participate in the nation’s labor force in June, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In June, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, hit 250,663,000. Of those, 157,037,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,037,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 250,663,000 civilian noninstitutional population, the lowest labor force participation rate seen in 38 years. It hasn’t been this low since October 1977 when the participation rate was 62.4 percent.

Another 93,626,000 did not participate in the labor force. These Americans did not have a job and were not actively trying to find one.

Of the 157,037,000 who did participate in the labor force, 148,739,000 had a job, and 8,299,000 did not have a job were actively seeking one—making them the nation’s unemployed.

The 8,299,000 job seekers were 5.3 percent of the 157,037,000 actively participating in the labor force during the month. Thus, the unemployment rate was 5.3 percent which dropped from the 5.5 percent unemployment seen in May.

The number of employed Americans dropped from 148,795,000 in May to 148,739,000 in June, a decline of 56,000. The number of unemployed Americans also dropped over the month from 8,674,000 in May to 8,299,000 in June, a decline of 375,000.

The labor participation rate was 65.7 percent the day Barack Hussein Obama took office.

I like this article because it’s one of the first I’ve seen that actually gives you a notion of the statistical shenanigan that our “unemployment rate” truly is.  Nearly 94 million working-age people are unemployed, but our unemployment rate only considers 8 million of them.  I guess the other 86 million are silver-spoon trust-fund kids lounging around their mansions sipping champagne and dining on the finest caviar.  Either that or you’re an “abject imbecile” – another synonym for “Democrat” to go alongside “disgusting, dishonest, pathological hypocrite.”

As I’ve been trying to point out over and over again, Obama has been to the labor participation rate what stage 5 lung and bronchus cancer is to quality of life.  Obama has been absolutely devastating and toxic to American jobs.  And like the stage 5 lung and bronchus cancer sufferer, the patient that is the American economy is actually getting weaker and weaker measured in terms of the ALL-IMPORTANT measure of how many working-age Americans actually have a damn JOB.  The rate of Americans with a damn JOB – which for the factual record are LOWER PAYING JOBS with FEWER HOURS under Obama – has been sinking and sinking and sinking.  Thanks to the Obama presidency and the stage five cancer that is the Democrat Party, fewer and fewer Americans are working, while more and more of those fewer and fewer are working for less and cannot get decent full-time jobs.

And what is the Democrat strategy?  Well, further disincentivize employers by putting more and more burdens and obstacles on them.  You know, like treating that stage five lung and bronchus cancer patient with concentrated dosages of asbestos and then blaming the fact that the patient keeps getting sicker on Republicans.

I’ve listened to the smartest, smarmiest Democrats trying to explain why the labor participation rate is so shockingly low under Obama.  Here’s one example:

There are a few reasons why the LFPR has declined. First, the country is aging as baby boomers retire. An older country means a lower percent of the population will be in the labor force. This is a structural reason for the LFPR’s recent decline—it was going to happen regardless of the underlying economic conditions. That’s why many economists forecasted that the rate would slowly fall over time.

Here’s the problem, smart, smarmy Democrat: you’re exactly what the Bible foretold when it said, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…”  Consider the FACTS that blow the Democrat theory right out of the water akin to the way that the reality of Japanese torpedoes blew up the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor when Democrats also didn’t have a freaking clue what the hell was going on:

Last week, though, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis took on the notion that the drop is all about demographics and not a sign that the labor market is sicker than we think. The study looked at the labor force participation rate not just in the U.S. but in eight major developed countries, including Sweden, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Nearly all of those countries are facing the same demographic trends as the U.S. And Japan is currently dealing with an even more severe case of aging population. And yet, out of the eight nations, the U.S. is the only one where the participation in the labor force is declining.

So much for the Democrat theory that, well, shoot, you can’t blame Obama for the collapse in labor participation.  It was just selfish Republican white people retiring.  Because all the OTHER developed nations have the same demographic issues as America does -with Japan’s aging population FAR WORSE.  And yet somehow we’re doing worse than ANY of them in labor participation.

And for another factoid, it is striking that Democrats are trying to point at an aging demographic to explain our dismal labor participation rate:  BECAUSE THEY HAVE MURDERED SIXTY MILLION INNOCENT BABIES IN THEIR GOD DAMN ABORTION MILLS SINCE 1973 AND WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK THAT WOULD DO TO THE AVERAGE DAMN AGE OF OUR POPULATION???  It’s akin to the classic example of the child who murdered both his parents and then asked for mercy from the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan.  And so we can now document that that proverbial godawful kid is a DEMOCRAT through and through.

If you are a DEMOCRAT – which stands for DEMOn-possessed bureauCRAT – you are a liar without shame, honor, decency, virtue, or integrity of any kind whatsoever.  And one of the reasons you so worship government is that your love of lies most flourishes because the best way to lie of ALL is with STATISTICS.

The article includes a rather striking graph that shows America DEAD LAST among the top developed nations but I keep looking at it:

What I particularly noticed as I stared in horror at this graph of the demise of my country was the fact that Bush was actually bringing the baby up between 2005 and the middle part of 2008.  I checked the Department of Labor chart and the actual numbers back up the graph: the labor participation rate was actually going UP.  Clinton left office just before a TERRIBLE RECESSION PLUS THE DOUBLE-WHAMMY OF THE 9/11 ATTACK struck America as a result of Clinton’s leaving America weak and blind in the face of our enemies.  That recession was called the DotCom Bubble collapse.

Here’s an example of how I’ve pointed out these stubborn things called FACTS in the past:

Clinton’s DotCom crash resulted in $7.1 trillion in American wealth being vaporized:

The Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap was $16.7 Trillion as of April 30, 2008. Comparatively, the market cap at the end of Q1 in 2000 was approximately $16 trillion (only slightly smaller). However, between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003 the index lost a stunning 43% of its valuation. In other words, $7.1 Trillion of wealth was lost. This stunning number includes the completeness of the crash.

Who was still president in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2000 when this disaster began to blow up?  It was the guy who was still president on January 20, 2001 when George Bush assumed – and dare I say “inherited” – the office of the president.

Here’s another number to think about: 78%.  Because “The Nasdaq Composite lost  78% of its value as it fell from 5046.86 to 1114.11” as it collapsed between March 11, 2000 to October 9, 2002.

Obviously, there was a problem. The first shots through this bubble came from  the companies themselves: many reported huge losses and some folded outright  within months of their offering. Siliconaires were moving out of $4 million  estates and back to the room above their parents’ garage. In the year 1999,  there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of  those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading. In  2001 the number of IPOs dwindled to 76, and none of them doubled on the first  day of trading.

I want to know why Bush is still responsible for Obama’s entire economic mess four years later when Bill Clinton was never held responsible for so much as one second of Bush’s mess.  I want to understand why Democrats are lying, dishonest, hypocrite slime whose only talent is bankrupting America and then demagoguing Republicans for what they did.

You find out that the Dotcom bubble began to grow huge in 1995 and virtually all of Clinton’s economic “success” that didn’t have to do with the policies of the Republican House and the Republican Senate that swept into power in 1995 as a result of the historic 1994 asskicking as a result of Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s abject failure had to do with the inflation of that damn bubble.  Clinton fanned the flames of that Dotcom bubble because he knew that it would explode on the next president’s watch and that Democrats were far too personally and pathologically dishonest to ever blame HIM for it.

And yet Bill Clinton saunters before the 2012 Democrat National Convention and gives a speech saying “You can’t blame Obama for this disaster of an economy.  Why, even I couldn’t have fixed it.”  And the liberal media listen to their former messiah absolve their current messiah and ignore the fact that Bill Clinton is a serial liar who was DISBARRED by the Supreme Court for LYING as well as a serial womanizing sexual predator who sexually abused five women and they said, “Well, that settles it.  NO one can blame ‘the One’ now; the former ‘One’ has spoken.”  And the “War on Women” party cheers.

I’ve been pointing this out over and over again recently: if you are a Democrat, you are a LIAR at home with LIES.  You are a BAD PERSON.  You have one middle finger stuck up in the air at the God of the Bible you rabidly despise and the other middle finger shoved up your rectum because you are a DEPRAVED PERVERT.

The above quote is about how Bill Clinton led America straight into the vicious  gut-punch of a giant recession that the pathologically dishonest propaganda mill that is the mainstream media refused to credit him with even though there is no question that the economy was clearly going into recession as Bill Clinton was still in office which then exploded under George Bush.  But we’ve also got to consider the knockout-punch to the head that was the 9/11 attack as a result of Bill Clinton leaving America both weak and blind and with a reputation for withdrawing from conflict.  You know, just as Barack Obama has now done to America.  Obama isn’t just the first president since Kennedy to beg for spacecraft rides because he’s pissed away our space capability; he’s now actually having to beg for ships to deploy our Marines!!!  In a time when our enemies are building up their militaries and becoming stronger, America under Obama is becoming weaker and weaker.  Which is why we’re getting bullied around – by Islamic State, by China, by Russia, by Iran, just to name a few enemies – like we have never been in my entire lifetime.

We are ripe for an attack by emboldened enemies.  And no nation has EVER deserved to be attacked more than this wretched Obamanation.

Another thing I noticed as I look at the above graph is that the liberal explanation that the labor participation rate was highest under Bill Clinton fails to consider a key fact (not including the fact that it was actually much higher under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush than it ever was under Bill Clinton): I notice that the labor participation rate PLUNGED under Bill Clinton for the first years of his presidency when he was playing the role of liberal president with a Democrat Congress.  But then in 1994 Clinton had his ass handed to him by the American people who put REPUBLICANS in charge of both the House and the Senate.  And Bill Clinton ultimately uttered the famous words, “The era of big government is OVER.”  And it was under the REPUBLICAN policies OF reducing the giant jackboot of federal government power that the economy managed something of a rebound.  At least until the DotCom bubble and the 9/11 attack both of which Bill Clinton was solely responsible for, which forced George Bush to build it up all over again.

I’ve patiently explained why the economy collapsed under the Bush presidency.  It was the Democrat-constructed housing bubble enacted by the Democrat-created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (otherwise known as GSEs, which is the acronym for the blatantly leftist fascistic crony capitalist monstrosity of Government Sponsored Enterprises).  I end the second of the above articles I link to with this:

What did Democrats do with the mainstream media’s culpability?  They falsely dropped the crisis at the feet of “greedy” Wall Street.  But while examples of Wall Street greed abound, the liberal intelligentsia deliberately overlooked the central and preceding role of Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s how the mess actually happened:

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, any intelligent observer should note a primary conflict that amounts to a fundamental hypocritical contradiction: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate.  And then to explode.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.

We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats.  And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.

Anybody who wants to see “right wing Republican policies” in that 2008 collapse is what I call an idiot.  Democrats under Jimmy Carter enacted the Community Reinvestment Act – which insanely and immorally forced banks to make loans to poor minorities who couldn’t afford to actually pay for them – that was expanded under Bill Clinton at the tail end of his presidency; and Democrats then used the expanded GSEs to pound the crack in the economic wall that the CRA fiasco created wide open.  George W. Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to install sane regulations to control Fannie and Freddie, but Democrats rabidly refused to allow ANY controls for their out-of-control GSEs.  These are just FACTS.  Bush’s failure was that he shrugged his shoulders while Democrats planted a giant bomb in our economic engine; George Bush’s failure was that he failed to hunt every single Democrat down with dogs and burn them alive.

The fact of the matter is that when Clinton governed left, the economy floundered and was failing.  The American people went right, elected a rightwing Congress, and Clinton went with them for the greater part. Things that Bill Clinton gives himself sole credit for were actually platforms from the Republican Contract with America.  Now we’ve got this demonstrably false myth that Clinton was a liberal who governed as a liberal and that is why the economy flourished.

I’ve got to end somewhere, although I can literally go on all day.  Because the actual facts prove that Democrats are basically the cause of everything that is evil or ruinous in America.  So let me just end with something that George Will said a few weeks ago (when the labor participation rate merely matched the horror of 1978 rather than beat it for being even WORSE as it just did):

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: We could continue this conversation and I’m sure we will, but let’s turn to the economy and some really disappointing numbers on the economy this week. Here they are. Only 126,000 jobs were added in March. That’s the weakest hiring in 15 months. Labor force participation dropped to 62.7 percent, matching the lowest since 1978. And the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta estimates first quarter growth at zero, zero percent, flat. George, what’s going on here?

GEORGE WILL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, for the second year in a row they’ve blamed poor quarterly growth on insufficient global warming, that is on winter, on an unusually cold winter. Let your mind go back to November last year. There was job creation of 321,000 jobs and the administration said this is a miraculous achievement and a harbinger of things to come. It wasn’t a harbinger and it wasn’t miraculous. During the Reagan recovery there were 23 months of job creation over 300,000. Reagan had a month of job creation of 1 million and this was at a time when there were 75 million fewer Americans. Now, never mind zero growth. We are now being told really that two percent growth may be the new normal. If so, that’s a disaster because every day, today, yesterday, tomorrow, every day between now and 2030, 10,000 more baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. If we have two percent growth, the crisis of the welfare state, the crisis of the private sector being able to throw off the revenues, to pay the bills for the promises we’ve made to ourselves becomes impossible.

WALLACE: Just tell again that the labor force participation stat that you have, if it were what it was at the beginning of the Obama administration.

WILL: If the workforce participation rate today were as high as it was on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate in this country would be 9.7 percent, we wouldn’t be complaining about the bad recovery because we wouldn’t call it a recovery.

It takes the Holy Bible to explain the sheer idiocy that is a Democrat voter:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. — Isaiah 5:20

.

 

 

Scared Democrats Admit Bush Was Right On Tax Cutting Policy

More and more Democrats are admitting that increasing taxes on the rich people who actually create jobs would be a foolhardy thing to do.

That pours a big giant can of water on the fire Democrats started in the whole blame-Bush-for-the-economic-meltdown thing.  Bush’s tax cuts were the biggest straw man for Democrats.  And now some of the most prominent Democrats are saying we need to keep those same tax cuts that Democrats were universally demonizing only months ago.

More Dems buck plan to let taxes increase for rich
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP) – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON — Congress seems increasingly reluctant to let taxes go up, even on wealthier Americans.

Worried about the fragile economy and their own upcoming elections, a growing number of Democrats are joining the rock-solid Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s plans to let some of the Bush administration’s tax cuts expire.

Democratic leaders in Congress still back Obama, but the willingness to raise taxes is waning among the rank and file as the stagnant economy threatens the party’s majority in the House and Senate.

“In my view this is no time to do anything that could be jarring to a fragile recovery,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a first-term Democrat. […]

“It’s going to be hard to resist a one-year extension for everybody, given the state of the economy,” said Clint Stretch, a tax expert at the consulting firm Deloitte Tax LLP. “That’s where I think the ball is moving.”

The tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush. They provided help for both rich and poor, reducing the lowest marginal rates as well as the top ones and several in between. They also provided a wide range of income tax breaks for education, families with children and married couples.

Taxes on capital gains and dividends were reduced, while the federal estate tax was gradually repealed, though only through this year. […]

Another freshman Democrat, Rep. Bobby Bright of Alabama, said he would like to see all the tax cuts extended for two or three years, if lawmakers cannot agree on a more permanent plan.

“Party leaders are not my directors or my boss,” Bright said. “My boss is my constituents, and I’ve heard from a vast majority of my constituents that they don’t believe in tax increases on anybody at this point in time.”

Bright is high on the re-election endangered list, one of roughly four dozen Democrats in districts won by Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008.

In the Senate, where Democrats need unity and at least one Republican vote to overcome filibusters, at least three Democrats and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have said they want to extend all the tax cuts temporarily.

Several Democratic candidates for Senate have also come out in favor of extending them all, including Robin Carnahan in Missouri and Jack Conway in Kentucky.

“Jack Conway was in favor of the Bush tax cuts when they first passed (in 2001 and 2003), and he’s in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts now,” said spokeswoman Allison Haley.

An article in McClatchey Newspapers points out that if Democrats try to hike taxes on the rich, it will be Democrats who stood in the way:

Democrats unlikely to repeal tax cuts for the rich
By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party’s effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy.

Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders have been eager to extend the breaks for individuals who earn less than $200,000 annually and joint filers who make less than $250,000. Those who earn more would pay higher, pre-2001 rates starting next year.

However, a small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. Many face electorates that recoil at the mention of any tax increase. Some represent areas that are loaded with wealthier taxpayers. Further, some incumbent senators who don’t face voters this fall are reluctant to increase taxes on anyone while the economy remains sluggish.

Without their support, the push to raise rates on the rich probably will fail. […]

Many Democrats and Republicans are eager for a tax cut battle, seeing it as emblematic of each party’s economic principles.

“Now the administration is calling for a massive tax hike on small businesses in the middle of a recession,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who maintains that higher rates on the wealthy would hit small business hard, a point the Obama administration disputes.

“So it’s no surprise,” McConnell added, “that most Americans think the country is on the wrong track and that Democrat policies have failed to do anything to fix their top concern, the economy.”

Democratic leaders are convinced that voters won’t buy that argument. Not only will the public back higher taxes for the rich, but “we have an opportunity to generate $700 billion that could go to deficit reduction and badly needed programs,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., a co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus.

The middle class-only extension is thought to have strong support in the House, where Democrats have a huge majority, but some Democrats are reluctant.

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., represents the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, one of the nation’s wealthiest districts. Median family income there in 2008 was $117,892, well above the national average of $63,211. He said that repealing the top rates would have political consequences.

“Sometimes we forget how we became the majority. We did it by winning some affluent districts,” he said.

The bigger problem for Democrats looms in the Senate, where Majority Leader Reid’s immediate problem is getting the 60 votes needed to cut off debate on the measure. Democrats control 59 seats, and at least three of them — Bayh, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — have signaled that they won’t back a permanent repeal of the tax cuts for the wealthy.

They suggest a way out of a stalemate — temporarily extending all the expiring tax rates — but so far the leadership isn’t going along.

Sean Neary, a spokesman for Senate Budget Committee Chairman Conrad, said the senator backed such an extension “for now.”

“The general rule of thumb is that you do not raise taxes or cut spending during an economic downturn. That would be counterproductive,” Conrad said.

Nelson also offered what’s become the centrist Democratic mantra. He, too, said he’d back extending the tax breaks for the wealthy “for at least a period of time because raising taxes in a weak economy could impair recovery.”

That stand could be even more popular with Democratic candidates for the Senate who aren’t incumbents. The hottest races are in conservative states, such as Kentucky, where Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway are battling for the seat now held by Republican Sen. Jim Bunning.

Of the expiring tax cuts for the wealthy, Conway spokeswoman Allison Haley said that he “believes we should extend them now, especially when so many Kentucky families and small businesses are struggling under this recession.”

In Missouri, Republican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt and Democrat Robin Carnahan are in a tight race. Despite a welcoming embrace with Obama at a Kansas City fundraiser in July, Carnahan said last week that she wanted to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone.

“Now is not the time to raise taxes,” she said.

In Indiana, U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind., who’s seeking to replace Bayh, told the Evansville Courier & Press this summer that all the Bush-era tax cuts should become permanent.

That position makes sense, said Brian Vargus, a professor of political science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, because Indiana is “an overwhelmingly Republican state … and there is never support for taxes or public goods.”

So from this article we see the term “moderate.”  And the moderates are those Democrats who see a compromise to the looming war over tax cuts: keep them all for now.  Don’t hike taxes on the only economic class of Americans who have the wherewithal to actually create jobs.  Keep the the tax cuts for at least a year, if not 2-3 years.  But the hard-liner Democrats are willing to see the tax cuts end for EVERYONE in order to maintain their Marxist class warfare principle of punishing the rich for being successful.

Democrats offered two reasons in their unrelenting demagoguery of George Bush: 1) they said the tax cuts caused the economic disaster; and 2) they said Bush’s refusal to regulate caused the economic disaster.

But 1) is now blown apart, given DEMOCRATS’ current acknowledgment that the Bush tax cuts – yes, even for the rich – weren’t the bogey man Democrats have been saying.

And 2) suffers from the flaw that Bush DID try to regulate the entity most responsible for the meltdown that befell the economy in 2008, and the ONLY reason that entity was not reformed and regulated was because DEMOCRATS blocked Bush at every turn.

That entity was the Government Sponsored Enterprise, or GSE, commonly known by the brand names of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was Fannie and Freddie that expanded and ultimately exploded using dangerous subprime loans (see also here).  It was also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who bundled thousands of bad and good mortgages together into instruments called “mortgage backed securities” and sold them to the private sector.  And when no one could separate the good from the bad, uncertainty paralyzed the banking system and led to the crash.

A brief history of the mortgage meltdown reveals how it was the GSEs acting under Democrat policies that created the housing bubble – (and even Obama economic shill Christina Romer admits “the popping of the housing bubble had serious consequences” which “destroyed $13 trillion of wealth in 2008”) – and the corresponding mortgage crisis which imploded our economy:

In 1999, under pressure from the Clinton administration, Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest home mortgage underwriter, relaxed credit requirements on the loans it would purchase from other banks and lenders, hoping that easing these restrictions would result in increased loan availability for minority and low-income buyers. Putting pressure on the GSE’s (Government Sponsored Enterprise) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Clinton administration looked to increase their sub-prime portfolios, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development expressing its interest in the GSE’s maintaining a 50% portion of their portfolios in loans to low and moderate-income borrowers.^[10]

As noted, subprime mortgages sky-rocketed during the initial era of loosening of terms throughout the 1990’s. From a low of 5% of mortgages in 1994, to 14% in 1997, to 23% in 2005, subprime mortgages continued to boom in the early 2000’s. Following the 2004 initiative policy change spearheaded by a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital, subprimes became an even greater investment vehicle for investment banks and institutions in the U.S. and around the world. Since 1994, the securitization rate of subprime loans has increased from approximately 32 percent to nearly 78 percent of total subprime originations.^[11] This further exposed the financial community to the effects of the coming housing bubble.

Democrat policies created the housing bubble that Christina Romer acknowledges was the cause of the destruction of the US economy.

And the refusal of Democrats to reform and regulate Fannie and Freddie exploded that bubble.

Bush warned SEVENTEEN TIMES that we needed to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae or have an economic disaster on our hands.  John McCain urged action to avert an economic disaster.  And Democrats refused to budge to deal with the monster they created.

Again, Bush was right.  Democrats were profoundly wrong.

The mainstream media propagandists refused to report the truth.  They kept broadcasting a lie, and naive and frankly stupid Americans rewarded the Democrats who created the economic disaster with total power.

And we’ve been paying for that stupidity for the last two years.

As of today, Obama is at a dismal 42% approval, and in danger of plunging into the 30s.  45% of Americans now strongly disapprove of Obama, versus only 24% who still strongly approve of the job he’s doing “fundamentally transforming” our economy into a pre-industrial barter system.

Obama is in full meltdown mode as all of his campaign rhetoric is being revealed for the lies it always was:

And Democrats are deservedly going to meltdown right along with him.

Who REALLY Exploded Your Economy, Liberals Or Conservatives?

From Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, pages 67-71:

From where does the Statist acquire his clairvoyance in determining what is good for the public?  From his ideology.  The Statist is constantly manipulating public sentiment in a steady effort to disestablish the free market, as he pushes the nation down tyranny’s road.  He has built an enormous maze of government agencies and programs, which grow inexorably from year to year, and which intervene in and interfere with the free market.  And when the Statist’s central planners create economic perversions that are seriously detrimental to the public, he blames the free market and insists on seizing additional authority to correct the failures created at his own direction.

Consider the four basic events that led to the housing bust of 2008, which spread to the financial markets and beyond:

EVENT 1: In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to address alleged discrimination by banks in making loans to poor people and minorities in the inner cities (redlining).  The act provided that banks have “an affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered.¹ In 1989, Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requiring banks to collect racial data on mortgage applications.² University of Texas economics professor Stan Liebowitz has written that “minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications, but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.”³ Liebowitz also condemns a 1992 study conducted by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank that alleged systemic discrimination.  “That study was tremendously flawed.  A colleague and I … showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates.  Our study found no evidence of discrimination.”⁴ However, the study became the standard on which government policy was based.

In 1995, the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department issued regulations tracking loans by neighborhoods, income groups, and races to rate the performance of banks.  The ratings were used by regulators to determine whether the government would approve bank mergers, acquisitions, and new branches.⁵ The regulations also encouraged Statist-aligned groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, to file petitions with regulators, or threaten to, to slow or even prevent banks from conducting their business by challenging the extent to which banks were issuing these loans.  With such powerful leverage over banks, some groups were able, in effect, to legally extort banks to make huge pools of money available to the groups, money they in turn used to make loans.  The banks and community groups issued loans to low-income individuals who often had bad credit or insufficient income.  And these loans, which became known as “subprime” loans, made available 100 percent financing, did not always require the use of credit scores, and were even made without documenting income.⁶ Therefore, the government insisted that banks, particularly those that wanted to expand, abandon traditional underwriting standards.  One estimate puts the figure of CRA-eligible loans at $4.5 trillion.⁷

EVENT 2: In 1992, the Department of Housing and Urban Development pressured two government-chartered corporations – known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae – to purchase (or “securitize”) large bundles of these loans for the conflicting purposes of diversifying the risks and making even more money available to banks to make further risky loans.  Congress also passed the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act, eventually mandating that these companies buy 45% of all loans from people of low and moderate incomes.⁸ Consequently, a SECONDARY MARKET was created for these loans.  And in 1995, the Treasury Department established the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provided banks with tax dollars to encourage even more risky loans.

For the Statist, however, this was still not enough.  Top congressional Democrats, including Representative Barney Frank (Massachusetts), Senator Christopher Dodd (Connecticut), and Senator Charles Schumer (New York), among others, repeatedly ignored warnings of pending disaster, insisting that they were overstated, and opposed efforts to force Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to comply with usual business and oversight practices.⁹ And the top executives of these corporations, most of whom had worked in or with Democratic administrations, resisted reform while they were actively cooking the books in order to award themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.¹⁰

EVENT 3: A by-product of this government intervention and social engineering was a financial instrument called the “derivative,” which turned the subprime mortgage market into a ticking time bomb that could magnify the housing bust by orders of magnitude.  A derivative is a contract where one party sells the risk associated with the mortgage to another party in exchange for payments to that company based on the value of the mortgage.  In some cases, investors who did not even make the loans would bet on whether the loans would be subject to default.  Although imprecise, perhaps derivatives in this context can best be understood as a form of insurance.  Derivatives allowed commercial and investment banks, individual companies, and private investors to further spread – and ultimately multiply – the risk associated with their mortgages.  Certain financial and insurance institutions invested heavily in derivatives, such as American International Group (AIG).¹¹

EVENT 4:  The Federal Reserve Board’s role in the housing boom-and-bust cannot be overstated.  The Pacific Research Institute’s Robert P. Murphy explains that “[the Federal Reserve] slashed rates repeatedly starting in January 2001, from 6.5 percent until they reached a low in June 2003 of 1.0 percent.  (In nominal terms, this was the lowest the target rate had been in the entire data series maintained by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, going back to 1982)….  When the easy-money policy became too inflationary for comfort, the Fed (under [Alan] Greenspan and the then new Chairman Ben Bernanke at the end) began a steady process of raising interest rates back up, from 1.0 percent in June 2004 to 5.25 percent in June 2006….”¹² Therefore, when the Federal Reserve abandoned its role as steward of the monetary system and used interest rates to artificially and inappropriately manipulate the housing market, it interfered with normal market conditions and contributed to destabilizing the economy.

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¹ Howard Husock, “The Trillion-Dollar Shakedown that Bodes Ill for Cities,” City Journal, Winter 2000.

² Stan Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal,” New York Post, Feb. 5, 2008.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Howard Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA,” City Journal, Oct. 30, 2008.

⁶ Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal.”

⁷ Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA.”

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Editorial, “Fannie Mae’s Patron Saint,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2008; Joseph Goldstein, “Pro-Deregulation Schumer Scores Bush For Lack of Regulation,” New York Sun, Sept. 22, 2008; Robert Novack, “Crony Image Dogs Paulson’s Rescue Effort,” Chicago-Sun Times, July 17, 2008.

¹⁰ Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Freddie Mac,” Dec. 2003; Office of Federal Housing Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae,” May 2006.

¹¹ Lynnley Browning, “AIG’s House of Cards,” Portfolio.com, Sept. 28, 2008.

¹² Robert P. Murphy, “The Fed’s Role in the Housing Bubble,” Pacific Research Institute blog.

The government links from footnote 10 have been purged (and I COUNT on left-leaning “news” sources to purge stories that reveal the left for what it is), but there is plenty of evidence that a) Fannie and Freddie were firmly in the hands of Democrats; b) that Democrats and Fannie/Freddie at least twice resisted reforms by President Bush and Republicans; and c) that Fannie and Freddie executives – who were deeply involved with Democrat activism – actively cooked the books to obtain huge bonuses prior to the disastrous crash.  We can also demonstrate d) that Barack Obama and Chris Dodd were involved with corrupt Fannie and Freddie (and Obama and Dodd were also receiving large contributions from corrupt Lehman Bros. even as Obama was getting a sweetheart mortgage deal from corrupt Tony Rezko while Chris Dodd was getting sweetheart mortgage deasl from corrupt Countrywide) right up to the tops of their pointy little heads.

When one examines the actual factors that led to the housing mortgage meltdown (as Mark Levin documents), when one examines the Democrat’s patent refusal to even accept that there was even a problem with Fannie and Freddie – much less allow any regulation – prior to the ensuing disaster, and when one examines the record to see which politicians were receiving money from the parties most responsible for the disaster, there is clearly only one party to blame: the Democrat Party.

And they are right back to all their old tricks.  It was rampant and insane spending that got us into this financial black hole – and they want MORE on top of MORE spending.  Meanwhile, Democrats such as Barney Frank are hard at work trying to create the NEXT massively destructive housing bubble, ACORN is trying to seize houses from rightful owners in the name of the “poor,” liberals are making moral hazard that rewards recklessness and irresponsibility and punishes frugality and responsibility official government policy , even as the Obama administration is creating “solutions” to the foreclosure issue that have abjectly failed.