The tax cuts were only for the Rich?
No, they were merely called that because -- like almost everything Bush ever did -- they were so heavily tilted toward benefitting the already wealthy.
Also, the Cuts were put in place before we were attacked. Who knows what would of happened if we hadn't.
More to the point (and almost anything would be), they were passed before the road to the credit crisis had become clear. But when they failed (as predicted) and the Fed had to jump in to freeze interet rates at 1% in a last-ditch effort to stimulate economic activity, that path became a whole lot clearer.
You are correct, I made a mistake, it was the Senate that the Dems controlled in 2001-2002.
The Senate was 50-50 in 2001, but because Cheney would cast the tie-breaking vote, Republicans were in control. In June 2001 however, Jim Jeffords -- a lifelong Republican fed up with his party's refusal to fund education for the disabled -- left the Republican Party and became an Independent caucusing with the Democrats. That gave them control of the calendar and committee chairs for 18 months.
The country was attacked by an enemy which Clinton refused to deal with.
That's quite irrelevant and also a hoot. Clinton is the guy who was always off on one of those wag-the-dog wild goose chases of his, going after some guy bin Laden when any Republican could have told you that the REAL issue was Monica Lewinsky. Bush on the other hand was the guy who decided that the attack on the USS Cole was a "stale" issue by five months later, so they weren't going to do anything about it. In fact, having been told by outgoing Clinton staff that terrorism would be the number one problem on their watch, the Bush administration completely ignored the matter until they were blind-sided on 9/11.
The military was in dismal shape. During Clinton, the military had been drastically cut of Personnel, however, number of squadrons, divisions and other "fighting" units were barely touched, forcing greater utilization rates of remaining personnel. In 2000, the DoD was funded at a staggering $260.8, with just the maintenance cost for the Air Force alone rose to over $100 Billion in the mid 90's.
All of this is rubbish, and again, what on earth does any of it have to do with the fact that "only" increasing the debt by $5 trillion doesn't quite sound so hot when it was "only" $5.7 trillion to begin with.
Meanwhile, military and intelligence downsizing had kicked in under Bush-41 concurrent with the fall of the Soviet Union. That's just a matter of historical record. Total obligational authority for DOD was repeatedly cut over Bush's four years, including by 9.8% in 1992 and 8.1% in 1993. Meanwhile, force levels declined by nearly 20% -- from 2,202K to 1,776K.
And of course Bush-43 would fight his lovely wars in Afghanistan and Iraq using only and exactly the military that Clinton had left to him. You know what they say...
A commander-in-chief leads the military built by those who came before him. There is little that he or his defense secretary can do to improve the force they have to deploy. It is all the work of previous administrations.
-- Dick Cheney
Fortunately, that Clinton hand-me-down military was one that even in the face of declining budgets had moved forward into advanced command and control systems, precision weapons, expanded use of robotics, and communications protocols with real-time links between remote intelligence posts and boots on the ground. JDAMs and drones were Clinton products as well. Every time you hear about what a Predator or Global Hawk did, you should think of Clinton. The overwhelming speed and efficiency of military operations under Bush were owing to the quality and capacity that Bill Clinton had put together for him. Clinton also took care to boost military pay, retirement, and health care benefits -- all of which right-wingers naturally hate him for.
Your blogger source is an illiterate hack who makes almost as many mistakes as you do. Did you check his publications? Almost all are in the
Southern Economic Journal. I'd never heard of it, so I looked up its rankings. A well regarded, peer-reviewed journal might have an influence index approaching 100. A few are over 200. The index for the SEJ is 3. That's abysmal. It's vanity journal level. There is meanwhile nothing at all wrong with subprime lending. There is however something wrong with abuse of subprime credit markets. And it was the abuse of subprime and other markets that led to the bad paper that led to the credit crisis that led to the Great Bush Recession. Rather than putting a stop to any of it, Bush egged the abusers on, calling for more and more lending and lifting leverage limits to allow it. Cowboy capitalists enabled and encouraged by the awful fiscal, monetary, and laissez-faire regulatory policies of the
Bungler in Chief are what put us into the biggest black hole in 75 years.
Clearly the problem started long before Bush took office. Problems were identified and prediction of bailouts being needed in the future were made in 1999, before Bush even ran for office.
Well yes, the back story includes the Asian and Russian financial crises of the late 1990's that wiped out a significant number of the finance companies, That plus Bush's antagonism toward CRA helped create a credit vacuum in low- and moderate-income communities that unscrupulous private brokers could then easily push into, abusive practices and all;.
You can hold that line as long as you wish. But since taking office, yes, approximately $1 Billion went to a stimulus program. Where did the rest go?
The rest of what? Can you explain what it is you are trying to add up?
And even the stimulus had unreasonable political ties in it so some states necessarily rejected it.
Yet more unfounded slop. Led by right-wing rising star Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina (remember him proudly, right-wingers), a handful of whackjob southern governors walked away from free money for those struggling in their states to make an entirely partisan point. They put their own political needs ahead of the financial needs of people in their states. "Slime" is a good word for those folks.
That depends on how you want to define "fair". If they couldn't buy it under previous rules, then the rules should of never been changed. Want a house? Earn it. Don't earn enough, then make yourself more valuable, otherwise STFU.
We had people being denied credit when they had more assets in the bank they were seeking to borrow from than the amount they were seeking to borrow. Their applications were denied simply because of their street address while similarly situated borrowers in other parts of town were being routinely approved for loans. Does that meet your definition of "fair," or would you oppose practices such as that?
On the other side of the coin, there has never been any law, policy, rule, or court order requiring anyone to lend anything to anyone who was not qualified for the loan. The fact is that a large contingent of unscrupulous mortgage brokers quite purposely and voluntarily did put people into mortgages they knew full well would fail simply because those mortgages would make a lot of profit for them and for their Wall Street securitizers. Paper-churning for fun and profit. Strip off all the gains, sell off all the risk. After all, I won't be here and you won't be here -- whatever problems will all fall into somebody else's lap. Meanwhile, we'll all get rich.
I also never said Bush/Republicans didn't help it along and they certainly didn't stop it. But, they were not the originators of the crises.
They absolutely WERE the originators of the crisis along with the cowboy capitalists they cheered on and opened doors for and then refused to regulate even when evidence of credit market abuse began piling up to the rafters. Warnings of an eventual crisis building in a stock of poorly underwritten adjustable-rate loans had begun to appear in professional and scholarly writings by late 2003. The chorus grew from there, but it was all ignored. Like the Wall Streeters, the Bush administration wanted its profits now and didn't care about bills that would come due in the future. We tend to descibe that sort of thing with words like "incompetence" and "malfeasance". These were in fact the hallmarks of the entire Bush-43 era.