Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Some of the OWS crowd are still parroting the Obama campaign mantra of “eight failed years of Bush policies” that half of America bought into. But when you look back at the facts you learn that Obama is on the team that helped create the problem we are facing. This has been well documented (and equally ignored by Democrats and their pet press cronies). Despite 9/11, Bush II enjoyed a strong economy for six years. What changed? 1) Democratic control of Congress, and 2) the much anticipated burst of the housing bubble. Republicans don’t entirely own this process, in fact, Democrats own the vast majority of the responsibility. But that’s not what the President said in his first press conference. (for some perspective on the first presser, read this and/or this.)
“As I said, the one concern I’ve got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don’t doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing.”
Democrats today are fond of calling Republicans “the party of no” and falsely claiming that Republicans have never offered alternative plans. As Ed Morrissey said after an Obama press conference in 2009, Republicans in both the House and Senate have offered at least two alternative stimulus packages. None of them demanded that Obama “do nothing”. In fact, it was the Congressional Budget Office and not Republicans that suggested that doing nothing might have a better effect than the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus bill.”
At the time Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd among others were, and still are, in complete denial of how this crisis was created. Team Obama campaigned on the “eight years of failed Bush policies” slogan that is frankly a bald-faced lie. In fact, according to Barron’s, “Contrary to a view popularized during the 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation. The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.”
Let me repeat that. “The Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.” Even Liberal financial genius George Soros has opined on the cause of the crisis.
“Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to sub-prime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.” — George Soros
Our economic situation was not created by “eight years of failed Bush policies.” It was not created by big oil or Dick Cheney. It was born in1977 under Jimmy Carter in the form of the CRC; it was strengthened in1995-1999 by Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Rubin “brokered a deal between the administration and Congress that allowed banking deregulation to move forward. Shortly after the compromise was reached, Rubin took a top position at Citigroup, which went on to embark upon mergers that would have been rendered illegal under Glass-Steagall. As the New York Times put it, Rubin would be leading “what has become the first true American financial conglomerate since the Depression”—a conglomerate that could exist only because of legislation he had just shepherded through Congress.” (source)
Our liberal friends are saying ”But Bush was a de-regulator! It was the deregulation that did it man!” Wrong. GWB started raising red flags in 2001, and disclosed at a Congressional hearing in 2003 that “a new agency would have been created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.” What was the Democratic response to this suggestion?”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not in a financial crisis,’‘ (source: see 2:25) said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2003. Personally, if we can jail the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom, I think Frank should be in jail for his poitical and financial negligence. He is willfully denying the truth that has put America in a scary place.
So, I implore President Obama and the left to stop with the scare tacticts and stop with the lies. Stop blaming the previous president for the country’s woes and start doing something about it. And I don’t mean do anything, I mean do the right thing. Swift, knee-jerk actions made under diress do not usually have positive outcomes. Funding green companies with billions of tax dollars without doing the proper financial analysis will give you the same result experienced by many that funded anything with “dot com” after its name about a decade ago. Slow down, think this through. And for God’s sake please include both parties in the problem solving process. Stop campaigning, start leading.
One of the biggest myths about our current economic situation is that it was caused by the failed policies of George W. Bush. President Obama described it as “a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years…” I guess he drinks his own kool-ade. The Wicked Speaker from the West blames “the Bush administration’s eight long years of failed deregulation policies.” Captain Peanut, a.k.a. President Carter, blames the “atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration,” particularly “deregulation and . . . a withdrawal of supervision of Wall Street.”
But what is the truth?
We first need to define how to measure deregulation. I suggest three categories:
- Paperwork: Pages of legislation
- Money: Budget spending
- People: Staffing levels
Paperwork
Under the Bush Administration the Federal Register – the government’s annual compendium of proposed and finalized regulations – was more than 74,000 pages every year but one. During the Clinton years, by contrast, the Federal Register reached that length just once. Overall, the final outcome of this Republican regulation has been a significant increase in regulatory activity and cost since 2001. The number of pages added to the Federal Register, which lists all new regulations, reached an all-time high of 78,090 in 2007, up from 64,438 in 2001.
In addition, President Bush signed hundreds of laws commanding federal agencies to produce new regulations. One is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which established new or enhanced standards for all publicly held companies and accounting firms in the United States. Another is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, which imposed new restrictions on campaign spending and prohibited unregulated contributions (“soft money”) to national political parties.
Money
Adjusting for inflation, the regulatory budget grew from $25 billion in fiscal year 2000 to an estimated $43 billion in FY 2009 – a 70 percent increase. “In constant dollars,” writes James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal, “the Bush regulatory budget increases vastly exceed those of predecessors Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and, yes, Lyndon Johnson.” Freeman also write “Looking at regulatory spending in percentage terms, Mr. Bush’s staggering 2003 increase of more than 24% was the largest in the last 50 years.”
Ten Largest Annual Percentage Increases
in Total Regulatory Budget Spending (last 50 years)
| GW Bush 2003 Nixon 1973 Nixon 1971 GW Bush 2002 Nixon 1972 Kennedy 1963 Ford 1976 Nixon 1970 Johnson 1968 Nixon 1975 |
24.3% 20.0 19.6 16.4 14.6 13.6 10.9 10.6 09.5 09.4 |
The Bush team spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history. Between fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009, outlays on regulatory activities, adjusted for inflation, increased from $26.4 billion to an estimated $42.7 billion, or 62 percent. By contrast, President Clinton increased real spending on regulatory activities by 31 percent, from $20.1 billion in 1993 to $26.4 billion in 2001.
With specific regard for the category of finance and banking, expenditures were cut by 3 percent during the Clinton years and increased 29 percent from 2001 to 2009, making it very hard to argue that Bush deregulated the financial sector.
People
Let’s look at staffing levels. Regulatory agencies employed 175,000 people in 2000. They employ nearly 264,000 today. In eight years, Bush increased the federal government’s regulatory staff by 91,196 employees. In his eight years Clinton cut it by 969.
So there you have it. The Bush Adminstration spent more, wrote more, and employed more. Tell me Mr. President and Madam Speaker, how with a clear conscience can George W. Bush be called a failed de-regulator?
President Obama more than once took shots at the Bush administration by mentioning the mess that he has inherited. This is directly in line with the campaign mantra of “eight failed years of Bush policies” that half of America bought into. But when you look at the facts you learn that Obama is on the team that helped create the problem we are facing. This has been well documented (and equally ignored by Democrats and their pet press cronies). Despite 9/11, Bush II enjoyed a strong economy for six years. What changed? 1) Democratic control of Congress, and 2) the much anticipated burst of the housing bubble. Republicans don’t entirely own this process, in fact, Democrats own the vast majority of the responsibility. But that’s not what the President said in his first press conference this week. (for some perspective on the first presser, read this and/or this.)
“As I said, the one concern I’ve got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don’t doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing.”
As Ed Morrissey said yesterday, Republicans in both the House and Senate have offered at least two alternative stimulus packages. None of them demanded that Obama “do nothing”. In fact, it was the Congressional Budget Office and not Republicans that suggested that doing nothing might have a better effect than the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus bill.”
Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, among others, are in complete denial of how this crisis was created. And Team Obama campaigned on the “eight years of failed Bush policies” slogan that is frankly a bald-faced lie. In fact, according to Barron’s, “Contrary to a view popularized during the 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation. The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.”
Let me repeat that. “The Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.” Even Liberal financial genius George Soros has opined on the cause of the crisis.
Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to sub-prime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.
Our economic situation was not created by “eight years of failed Bush policies.” It was not created by big oil or Dick Cheney. It was born in1977 under Jimmy Carter in the form of the CRC; it was strengthened in1995-1999 by Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Rubin “brokered a deal between the administration and Congress that allowed banking deregulation to move forward. Shortly after the compromise was reached, Rubin took a top position at Citigroup, which went on to embark upon mergers that would have been rendered illegal under Glass-Steagall. As the New York Times put it, Rubin would be leading “what has become the first true American financial conglomerate since the Depression”—a conglomerate that could exist only because of legislation he had just shepherded through Congress.” (source)
Our liberal friends are saying “But Bush was a de-regulator! It was the deregulation that did it man!” Wrong. GWB started raising red flags in 2001, and disclosed at a Congressional hearing in 2003 that “a new agency would have been created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.” What was the Democratic response to this suggestion? ”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not in a financial crisis,’‘ (source: see 2:25) said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2003. Personally, if we can jail the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom, I think Frank should be in jail for his poitical and financial negligence. He is willfully denying the truth that has put America in a scary place.
So, I implore President Obama to stop with the scare tacticts and stop with the lies. Stop blaming the previous president for the country’s woes and start doing something about it. And I don’t mean do anything, I mean do the right thing. Swift, knee-jerk actions made under diress do not usually have positive outcomes. Slow down, think this through. And for God’s sake please include both parties in the problem solving process. Nancy Pelosi’s exclusionary leadership is in direct conflict with her campign promise of a more cooperative, collegial approach that allowed for dissent and debate. Fifty Democrats are asking for help to control the Speaker, but I don’t think it is working. Maybe a cage match between Pelosi and Obama is needed to determine who is actually leading our country?
