Not true. Emergency room doesn't cover any sort of chronic illness, which is what really wipes out families. It doesn't even cover crippling injury that takes a long time to recover from. Hell, it doesn't even cover sick kids.
McCain's plan:
McCain's not talking about how he plans to pay for the health insurance tax credit - by taxing employees for their employer-based plans, for the first time in history.
If you've seen the debates, you've heard the statistics. McCain's plan would give a working couple a $5000 credit on the one hand, and take another $12000 in NEW taxes back from the same couple. Honestly, wtf is that?
But even worse, McCain's plan doesn't address the real main reason US health care costs so much - it's the insurance companies themselves, in the middle providing no services AND charging everyone involved - the patients, the doctors AND the hospitals themselves.
Obama:
Costs are basically paid through ratcheting back the insurance companies - who have doubled what their charging without any sort of increase in their costs.
As for catastrophic illness, that's defined as "severe illness requiring prolonged hospitalization or recovery; usually involves high costs for hospitals and doctors and medicines". Basically, something that comes along which has in and of itself the possibility of killing you, that takes a long time to heal from. Covering this is the most expensive kind of insurance. Obama's plan will have the government step in to help employers cover this part of the insurance, so that overall insurance costs to employers would be lower.
My personal preference would be for single-payer healthcare. This was what made Edwards my first choice as a candidate. Since he lost and then screwed his political future by not keeping it in his pants, Obama's plan is the next best thing.
It doesn't take anything ingenious to help fix our health care system. It just takes reducing the power of insurance companies, and creating pooled health care without insurance companies as the middle men - which is done by every single other first world nation, and most second and third-world ones that have any health care at all.
No, that's only for Emergency Room care. That does not cut it for chronic conditions, that need long-term care. Hell, that doesn't even help kids who regularly get sick.
Besides all the moral issues in helping our fellow human beings, long-term care is in our pragmatic best interest. If we want to have a healthy competitive workforce, we need a population that is healthy and able to compete without fear of being one illness away from losing their homes.
Let's compare *no* regulation vs. *some* regulation.
How's privatization and deregulation worked for the stock market? Even Greenspan admits this was doubleplus ungood.
How's privatization and deregulation worked for the public with energy companies? [cough]Enron[/cough].
We are better off trusting Congress than health and insurance companies - because the damage doesn't come from Congressfolk not being "experts" in medicine and medical billing. They can hire experts. No, the damage comes from companies hiring experts in BS to rip us off.
And Congress simply has less of a vested interest in ripping us off on health care. That's the simple reality of it.
As to the Glass-Steagal repeal, you might have a point there but again the major problem was the CRA loans and the push to force the banks to loan money to people who clearly could not repay the loan or else face problems with the law.
No; not only was the CRA only a part of Fannie Mae, and Fannie Mae not only a part of the overall subprime implosion - but with Glass-steagal still in place, only the housing market and mortgage banks would have been affected.
Just like a firewall, in which one computer goes down but the rest of the network stays secure and can distribute the increased load.
That was strictly the Democratic congress of 1994 under Clinton
So Clinton's laws were responsible for this going back to 1994 - but none of Bush's laws or policies for the past 8 years have anything to do with this? And while Bush and the GOP were in control of the House and Senate for 6 of those years, they couldn't do anything about it?
As for Enron, sure. Clinton was business friendly. That doesn't make him responsible for Enron's false accounting - that didn't even come out until after Clinton left office. He's not a mind-reader.
Here's what Bush did for Enron when he got in office:
http://www.alternet.org/story/12155/Shortly after taking office, President Bush waged a battle against the imposition of federal price controls in California that allowed Enron to price-gouge consumers by extending the energy crisis in California, costing the state billions of dollars. Enron reported increased revenues of almost $70 billion from the previous year.
So Bush helped Enron nearly bankrupt California - funds California is still paying off, I might add.
Bush also resisted attempts to crack down on Enron's utilization of its 847 offshore subsidiaries in countries with lax banking-regulation laws. The consumer-rights watchdog organization Public Citizen alleges that some of these offshore havens helped Enron defraud its stockholders.
So thanks to Bush, Enron didn't even have to pay it's fair share in taxes.
It is the invisible hand of the liberals trying to micromanage the free market that results in the workers getting punched in the nuts.
No, that simply is not true. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just telling you: that outlook simply is not supported by historical fact. It is not in alignment with observed reality.
Above are the specific examples that show the opposite - both conservative deregulation that's resulted in disaster (removal of Glass-Steagal, not implementing price controls on Enron) and Conservative government intervention that's hurt the working American (letting Enron gouge working families, and not even pay their fair share of taxes on it).
See?
Republicans and Democrats have both had a hand in creating this mess - and it wasn't because they interfered in the free market. Rules and regulations are required to make any group endeavor work smoothly, and the Free Market is the defining example of this rule, rather than any kind of an exception.
1. Fannie Mae was only 25% of the subprime implosion.
2. The CRA was only part of Fannie Mae's particular subprime implosion.
3. The overall subprime implosion only affected the rest of the market because of Glass-Steagal.
4. Bush was asked by several, including Obama, to address ALL of the coming subprime implosion - not just Fannie Mae's part in it. Bush did nothing.
5. The rest of the market was so weak because our country is so in the red. We're borrowing from China to pay our bills, and the world has lost confidence in our dollar AND our banks.
Fannie Mae was indeed a disaster. And it would be easy to blame everything on that. But it was only a part of the larger problem, and only one of the many institutions that have been coming down.
You sound like exactly the kind of conservative I can get along with. Then it becomes more of a policy discussion about what works, and what doesn't. And if an idea I initially disagree with happens to work better than I thought it would one, I'll be quite happy to be proven wrong.
I really hope, and I think it might actually be possible, that this election we will finally move beyond a lot of the distracting symbols we've had shouted at us, and really get into the substance of making things work, and hiring people who do the right work for us.
OK. If we're talking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then, they really are only one small part of our current mess. The other problems that really made this a disaster are:
- all the other banks besides F. Mae and Mac, who were riding the subprime bandwagon - Mae and Mac were only 25% of those mortgages
- worst of of all: the repealing of Glass-Steagal.
With Glass-Steagal in place, this would have been rough but 'only' as bad as the Silverado S&L collapse of the late 1980's; the subprime mortgage collapse would have been firewalled off from investment banking. Instead the dominoes are crossing financial sectors and even continents to fall...
I think maybe this is less mentioned than it should be, because BOTH parties led to the repealing of Glass-Steagal, in 1999. Bill Clinton and the GOP-led house and Senate, working together in a rare act of fully bipartisan stupidity...
Got sources for Bush saying that, in 2001? And I"m not clear on exactly what you mean that "We find out from the Swedes that BUsh was right".
I just did a quick google search, and I'm not finding anything that Bush said in 2001 that's anything similar to what Krugman said. Specifically, about the danger that inflated housing prices would pose to the world economy.
Since in 2001 the economy was still recovering from the Internet bust, and people had yet to start heavily investing in housing as a 'safer' place to put their money (housing prices are *always* going to go up, aren't they?) - I'd be pretty surprised to see this sort of prescience from Bush.
Also, not finding any sources for Bush trying to stop the subprime mortgage crisis at any time before everyone else started talking about it, around 2007; nor am I finding any sources that McCain was agreeing with Bush before 2007 re: the subprime mortgage crisis, and how it was threatening to meltdown our economy.
Also, Barack Obama predicted the subprime crisis and tried to get Paulson to act on it, in 2007.
True enough. To this current group, millionaires are barely middle class.:)
And thank God all those bureaucrats aren't working together. It's hard to imagine a world more terrifying than one big DMV.
Somehow I trust somebody talking about economics who has actually DONE things more than a crazy old marxist ranting tired old BSD drivel in a dying (Netcraft confirms it!) newspaper.
Since all those millionaires running our economy have done so well for us recently...
Buckley was a great writer, but I don't see him as a great intellectual. Granted, I'm not a conservative. But from what I've read of his work, I haven't read a lot of logical points. It's occurred to me more as dressing up some points that I consider rather irrational - his support of segregation and the Viet Nam war, for instance - in beautiful phrases that *sound* reasonable, as long as the underlying assumptions aren't looked at clearly.
I've always thought of the Foundation series, that Asimov painted himself into a corner. He started out with the premise that an ideal human society would be run from on top by the "smart people", who were the only people who could be unbiased and with the best of intentions.
Then, as he got further towards the end of that first arc, around "Second Foundation" I think he started to see a bit more clearly into the inner politics and power-lust of all humans, smart or not. This shows in some of the internal politics shown by the inside of the Second Foundation.
So I think he merged the robots into this universe, as the only way to have a group of rulers who really could be trusted to serve humans selflessly.
This was a bit of a cop-out, for me. I think a cooler ending would be to have ended the arc with Hari Seldon having seen the possibility of his own Second Foundation becoming a well-intentioned tyranny - and set things up in a way that they couldn't see their own demise, as well, as everyone attained the skills and knowledge stemming from psychohistory.
But, I didn't write it.:) And that's overall a nitpick on my part - they're still great stories with a lot of great ideas in them.
More to my point, is that he tends to be right in general. And from most of what I've seen, even when he's disagreed with people - I have yet to see him and his logical points actually proven wrong.
I agree very much with your post, I just want to post a qualification on one point: The Clinton years.
Clinton ran contrary to the Voodoo-economics-in-practice of cutting taxes on the rich; instead he cut taxes on the poor and middle class and increased programs to help the poor and middle class.
Then as the boom years kicked in and tax revenues increased, the GOP fought him tooth and nail to cut taxes rather than continue to reduce the deficit.
So, since Clinton pursued a tax policy that was the opposite of typical GOP practice, and he then went all the way to shutting down the government rather than going along with their plan, it seems to me that Clinton deserves considerably more than half of the credit for reducing the deficit.
And not only has he been rude to those he's disagreed with - Krugman's actually had the horrible to tend to be right! And about one issue after another, too!
I mean, if only he'd had the common decency to NOT predict the housing bubble, and the complete havoc it could wreak on our economy. Then everyone who told him he was totally wrong wouldn't be nursing their hurt feelings.
I'd also like to point out that there's an important distinction between bias in the interpretation of facts, and bias in distorting or omitting the facts themselves.
DailyKos , Keith Olbermann, et al. interpret the facts differently than conservatives - but they still are based very heavily in the facts. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity et al. will eliminate any inconvenient facts out of discussion, and shamelessly replace them with factoids pulled freshly from their rears.
This way of dealing with information has caused some short-term gains for conservatism as a movement, but has required constantly raising the stakes and distracting from accountability to keep it going. I think this strategy's now finally starting to it's long-term weakness: after the last 8 years, people just aren't believing them anymore.
1. You are dead wrong about what happened in the financial market. The damage to the market can in fact be traced to the *removal* of one particular regulation - the Glass-Steagal act, which forced investment banks to be firewalled off from mortgage banks.
This regulation was in place since the first (and hopefully the only) Great Depression because of that collapse, and stayed in place until it was repealed in the late 1990's.
2. Ideally we **would** have more choices for broadband providers. But broadband requires a big infrastructure, and the big players are already in place. I don't think that Net Neutrality will matter enough to a larger customer base, that passing OR not passing Net Neutrality will give us more choices for broadband providers. Which means that, without something like Net Neutrality, the entire free nature of the Internet could be degraded and most users would never know - while our entire means of communication is fully at a few corporations' mercy.
Don't get me wrong - I want corporations making money. I just don't think that they can be depended on to always do right by consumers, without the government being able to enforce some restrictions on their power.
I'm most annoyed about points that have already been debunked thoroughly showing up again. McCain is currently the biggest offender in that category.
Accusing Obama of "voting to raise taxes 94 times", when we all know that's counting procedural votes that have nothing to do with actually passing the bill...saying Obama's plan raises taxes on everyone, when we all (including McCain) can go and look at his tax plan and see that it doesn't...Accusing Obama of saying the President should sit down and meet with Iran's bogeyman President directly and without preconditions, which Obama didn't say... Etc. Etc. and on and on - wasting time when new info could be sought and found.
It could be great if, when a candidate brings up an already disproved point, the moderator could then actually call it, show independent corroboration, and require the candidate to move on - but then the candidates would still have to play along with this.
If that's why they focus on Hoover and ignore FDR, then that's completely mistaken for at least 3 reasons:
1. It is not historically accurate (let alone even possible!) that 100% of all of FDR's economic policies for the 8 years after Hoover's administration, were all and solely continuations of Hoover's policies. Do I need to even mention all of FDR's job creation and public works programs? As only one set of examples.
2. Even if FDR had only pursued the exact same policies as Hoover, FDR still could have pursued those same policies in better and more constructive ways. So to just not even go over FDR, is a further huge hole in this "government intervention is always bad - just look at Herbert Hoover" theory.
3. To say that WWII helped eliminate the depression because it "made further domectic intervention impossible" - well,
that notion is in contradiction to actual historical fact. Quite the opposite - WWII caused a *****huge***** expansion of government intervention and control of business in **all** areas - not just limited to stocks and banks but all areas of domestic production. The entire boards of companies were directly taken over by the US Government - with some company heads being physically removed by actual soldiers. Government-controlled rationing was put into place for gas, food, and even sugar. Automobile factories were turned into airplane and bomb factories.
The position of most economists is that WWII helped shake off the last vestiges of the Great Depression, by putting a vast amount of people to work, and causing tons of actual goods and services to be expended. Then the post-war expansion was enabled by the US becoming the West's sole economic and military superpower.
This makes much more sense than a dogmatic "government intervention is always bad no matter what" model. That model simply does not match up with observed historical *and* current reality.
Oh man, can we stop with putting this whole crisis solely on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then on top of it say this proves the government should leave the "Free Market" alone??
1 - Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac weren't even taking on all of the loans - they were just a portion of the overall housing market
2 - If the rest of Wall Street hadn't been deregulated, then the rest of Wall Street wouldn't have gone down with the housing market.
And the regulation that kept mortgage banking separate from investment banking, and would have firewalled it off? Glass-Steagal. Which we originally put in place after the Great Depression.
Bad regulation doesn't mean we less regulation - it means we need good regulation.
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Not true. Emergency room doesn't cover any sort of chronic illness, which is what really wipes out families. It doesn't even cover crippling injury that takes a long time to recover from. Hell, it doesn't even cover sick kids.
McCain's plan:
McCain's not talking about how he plans to pay for the health insurance tax credit - by taxing employees for their employer-based plans, for the first time in history.
If you've seen the debates, you've heard the statistics. McCain's plan would give a working couple a $5000 credit on the one hand, and take another $12000 in NEW taxes back from the same couple. Honestly, wtf is that?
But even worse, McCain's plan doesn't address the real main reason US health care costs so much - it's the insurance companies themselves, in the middle providing no services AND charging everyone involved - the patients, the doctors AND the hospitals themselves.
Obama:
Costs are basically paid through ratcheting back the insurance companies - who have doubled what their charging without any sort of increase in their costs.
As for catastrophic illness, that's defined as "severe illness requiring prolonged hospitalization or recovery; usually involves high costs for hospitals and doctors and medicines". Basically, something that comes along which has in and of itself the possibility of killing you, that takes a long time to heal from. Covering this is the most expensive kind of insurance. Obama's plan will have the government step in to help employers cover this part of the insurance, so that overall insurance costs to employers would be lower.
My personal preference would be for single-payer healthcare. This was what made Edwards my first choice as a candidate. Since he lost and then screwed his political future by not keeping it in his pants, Obama's plan is the next best thing.
It doesn't take anything ingenious to help fix our health care system. It just takes reducing the power of insurance companies, and creating pooled health care without insurance companies as the middle men - which is done by every single other first world nation, and most second and third-world ones that have any health care at all.
Besides all the moral issues in helping our fellow human beings, long-term care is in our pragmatic best interest. If we want to have a healthy competitive workforce, we need a population that is healthy and able to compete without fear of being one illness away from losing their homes.
How's privatization and deregulation worked for the stock market? Even Greenspan admits this was doubleplus ungood.
How's privatization and deregulation worked for the public with energy companies? [cough]Enron[/cough].
We are better off trusting Congress than health and insurance companies - because the damage doesn't come from Congressfolk not being "experts" in medicine and medical billing. They can hire experts. No, the damage comes from companies hiring experts in BS to rip us off.
And Congress simply has less of a vested interest in ripping us off on health care. That's the simple reality of it.
No; not only was the CRA only a part of Fannie Mae, and Fannie Mae not only a part of the overall subprime implosion - but with Glass-steagal still in place, only the housing market and mortgage banks would have been affected.
Just like a firewall, in which one computer goes down but the rest of the network stays secure and can distribute the increased load.
That was strictly the Democratic congress of 1994 under Clinton
So Clinton's laws were responsible for this going back to 1994 - but none of Bush's laws or policies for the past 8 years have anything to do with this? And while Bush and the GOP were in control of the House and Senate for 6 of those years, they couldn't do anything about it?
As for Enron, sure. Clinton was business friendly. That doesn't make him responsible for Enron's false accounting - that didn't even come out until after Clinton left office. He's not a mind-reader.
Here's what Bush did for Enron when he got in office: http://www.alternet.org/story/12155/ Shortly after taking office, President Bush waged a battle against the imposition of federal price controls in California that allowed Enron to price-gouge consumers by extending the energy crisis in California, costing the state billions of dollars. Enron reported increased revenues of almost $70 billion from the previous year.
So Bush helped Enron nearly bankrupt California - funds California is still paying off, I might add.
Bush also resisted attempts to crack down on Enron's utilization of its 847 offshore subsidiaries in countries with lax banking-regulation laws. The consumer-rights watchdog organization Public Citizen alleges that some of these offshore havens helped Enron defraud its stockholders.
So thanks to Bush, Enron didn't even have to pay it's fair share in taxes.
It is the invisible hand of the liberals trying to micromanage the free market that results in the workers getting punched in the nuts.
No, that simply is not true. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just telling you: that outlook simply is not supported by historical fact. It is not in alignment with observed reality.
Above are the specific examples that show the opposite - both conservative deregulation that's resulted in disaster (removal of Glass-Steagal, not implementing price controls on Enron) and Conservative government intervention that's hurt the working American (letting Enron gouge working families, and not even pay their fair share of taxes on it).
See?
Republicans and Democrats have both had a hand in creating this mess - and it wasn't because they interfered in the free market. Rules and regulations are required to make any group endeavor work smoothly, and the Free Market is the defining example of this rule, rather than any kind of an exception.
1. Fannie Mae was only 25% of the subprime implosion.
2. The CRA was only part of Fannie Mae's particular subprime implosion.
3. The overall subprime implosion only affected the rest of the market because of Glass-Steagal.
4. Bush was asked by several, including Obama, to address ALL of the coming subprime implosion - not just Fannie Mae's part in it. Bush did nothing.
5. The rest of the market was so weak because our country is so in the red. We're borrowing from China to pay our bills, and the world has lost confidence in our dollar AND our banks.
Fannie Mae was indeed a disaster. And it would be easy to blame everything on that. But it was only a part of the larger problem, and only one of the many institutions that have been coming down.
I agree; there seems to be a similar lack of awareness about issues of economic class.
I really hope, and I think it might actually be possible, that this election we will finally move beyond a lot of the distracting symbols we've had shouted at us, and really get into the substance of making things work, and hiring people who do the right work for us.
- all the other banks besides F. Mae and Mac, who were riding the subprime bandwagon - Mae and Mac were only 25% of those mortgages
- worst of of all: the repealing of Glass-Steagal.
With Glass-Steagal in place, this would have been rough but 'only' as bad as the Silverado S&L collapse of the late 1980's; the subprime mortgage collapse would have been firewalled off from investment banking. Instead the dominoes are crossing financial sectors and even continents to fall...
I think maybe this is less mentioned than it should be, because BOTH parties led to the repealing of Glass-Steagal, in 1999. Bill Clinton and the GOP-led house and Senate, working together in a rare act of fully bipartisan stupidity...
Ha! Passive-aggressive pacification of aggression. :)
I just did a quick google search, and I'm not finding anything that Bush said in 2001 that's anything similar to what Krugman said. Specifically, about the danger that inflated housing prices would pose to the world economy.
Since in 2001 the economy was still recovering from the Internet bust, and people had yet to start heavily investing in housing as a 'safer' place to put their money (housing prices are *always* going to go up, aren't they?) - I'd be pretty surprised to see this sort of prescience from Bush.
Also, not finding any sources for Bush trying to stop the subprime mortgage crisis at any time before everyone else started talking about it, around 2007; nor am I finding any sources that McCain was agreeing with Bush before 2007 re: the subprime mortgage crisis, and how it was threatening to meltdown our economy.
Also, Barack Obama predicted the subprime crisis and tried to get Paulson to act on it, in 2007.
True enough. To this current group, millionaires are barely middle class. :)
And thank God all those bureaucrats aren't working together. It's hard to imagine a world more terrifying than one big DMV.
Britain lost their empires after World War II. I think that maybe also have had a slight effect....
Since all those millionaires running our economy have done so well for us recently...
Buckley was a great writer, but I don't see him as a great intellectual. Granted, I'm not a conservative. But from what I've read of his work, I haven't read a lot of logical points. It's occurred to me more as dressing up some points that I consider rather irrational - his support of segregation and the Viet Nam war, for instance - in beautiful phrases that *sound* reasonable, as long as the underlying assumptions aren't looked at clearly.
Then, as he got further towards the end of that first arc, around "Second Foundation" I think he started to see a bit more clearly into the inner politics and power-lust of all humans, smart or not. This shows in some of the internal politics shown by the inside of the Second Foundation.
So I think he merged the robots into this universe, as the only way to have a group of rulers who really could be trusted to serve humans selflessly.
This was a bit of a cop-out, for me. I think a cooler ending would be to have ended the arc with Hari Seldon having seen the possibility of his own Second Foundation becoming a well-intentioned tyranny - and set things up in a way that they couldn't see their own demise, as well, as everyone attained the skills and knowledge stemming from psychohistory.
But, I didn't write it. :) And that's overall a nitpick on my part - they're still great stories with a lot of great ideas in them.
More to my point, is that he tends to be right in general. And from most of what I've seen, even when he's disagreed with people - I have yet to see him and his logical points actually proven wrong.
Clinton ran contrary to the Voodoo-economics-in-practice of cutting taxes on the rich; instead he cut taxes on the poor and middle class and increased programs to help the poor and middle class.
Then as the boom years kicked in and tax revenues increased, the GOP fought him tooth and nail to cut taxes rather than continue to reduce the deficit.
So, since Clinton pursued a tax policy that was the opposite of typical GOP practice, and he then went all the way to shutting down the government rather than going along with their plan, it seems to me that Clinton deserves considerably more than half of the credit for reducing the deficit.
I mean, if only he'd had the common decency to NOT predict the housing bubble, and the complete havoc it could wreak on our economy. Then everyone who told him he was totally wrong wouldn't be nursing their hurt feelings.
The sheer nerve of that guy!
I'd also like to point out that there's an important distinction between bias in the interpretation of facts, and bias in distorting or omitting the facts themselves.
DailyKos , Keith Olbermann, et al. interpret the facts differently than conservatives - but they still are based very heavily in the facts. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity et al. will eliminate any inconvenient facts out of discussion, and shamelessly replace them with factoids pulled freshly from their rears.
This way of dealing with information has caused some short-term gains for conservatism as a movement, but has required constantly raising the stakes and distracting from accountability to keep it going. I think this strategy's now finally starting to it's long-term weakness: after the last 8 years, people just aren't believing them anymore.
This regulation was in place since the first (and hopefully the only) Great Depression because of that collapse, and stayed in place until it was repealed in the late 1990's.
2. Ideally we **would** have more choices for broadband providers. But broadband requires a big infrastructure, and the big players are already in place. I don't think that Net Neutrality will matter enough to a larger customer base, that passing OR not passing Net Neutrality will give us more choices for broadband providers. Which means that, without something like Net Neutrality, the entire free nature of the Internet could be degraded and most users would never know - while our entire means of communication is fully at a few corporations' mercy.
Don't get me wrong - I want corporations making money. I just don't think that they can be depended on to always do right by consumers, without the government being able to enforce some restrictions on their power.
Accusing Obama of "voting to raise taxes 94 times", when we all know that's counting procedural votes that have nothing to do with actually passing the bill...saying Obama's plan raises taxes on everyone, when we all (including McCain) can go and look at his tax plan and see that it doesn't...Accusing Obama of saying the President should sit down and meet with Iran's bogeyman President directly and without preconditions, which Obama didn't say... Etc. Etc. and on and on - wasting time when new info could be sought and found.
It could be great if, when a candidate brings up an already disproved point, the moderator could then actually call it, show independent corroboration, and require the candidate to move on - but then the candidates would still have to play along with this.
1. It is not historically accurate (let alone even possible!) that 100% of all of FDR's economic policies for the 8 years after Hoover's administration, were all and solely continuations of Hoover's policies. Do I need to even mention all of FDR's job creation and public works programs? As only one set of examples.
2. Even if FDR had only pursued the exact same policies as Hoover, FDR still could have pursued those same policies in better and more constructive ways. So to just not even go over FDR, is a further huge hole in this "government intervention is always bad - just look at Herbert Hoover" theory.
3. To say that WWII helped eliminate the depression because it "made further domectic intervention impossible" - well, that notion is in contradiction to actual historical fact. Quite the opposite - WWII caused a *****huge***** expansion of government intervention and control of business in **all** areas - not just limited to stocks and banks but all areas of domestic production. The entire boards of companies were directly taken over by the US Government - with some company heads being physically removed by actual soldiers. Government-controlled rationing was put into place for gas, food, and even sugar. Automobile factories were turned into airplane and bomb factories.
The position of most economists is that WWII helped shake off the last vestiges of the Great Depression, by putting a vast amount of people to work, and causing tons of actual goods and services to be expended. Then the post-war expansion was enabled by the US becoming the West's sole economic and military superpower.
This makes much more sense than a dogmatic "government intervention is always bad no matter what" model. That model simply does not match up with observed historical *and* current reality.
And if he must stay alive, you'd think he could at least promise to buy you a new boat.
1 - Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac weren't even taking on all of the loans - they were just a portion of the overall housing market
2 - If the rest of Wall Street hadn't been deregulated, then the rest of Wall Street wouldn't have gone down with the housing market.
And the regulation that kept mortgage banking separate from investment banking, and would have firewalled it off? Glass-Steagal. Which we originally put in place after the Great Depression.
Bad regulation doesn't mean we less regulation - it means we need good regulation.