As someone who subscribes to 12-step thinking, I believe in focusing on today. We cannot alter what happened yesterday - or a month ago or 6 years ago. Calculate where we are today, and what steps are best taken, given all our circumstances.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that history is irrelevant. Finding out how we got to where we are, why it happened, what goals were set, what went right - and wrong - is often critical to avoiding more calamaties down the road.
Ed Morrissey investigates how we got from there to here in our current financial fiasco.
Victor Davis Hanson also enlightens us as to how we created our current monster.
The profiteering was not just the result of a few thousand scoundrels on Wall Street or in Washington, as greedy and as bonus-hungry as many of them no doubt were. Look at the housing market as a sort of musical chairs in which everyone profited as long he grabbed a seat when the music stopped. Then those left standing — with high-priced loans and negative equity when the crash came — defaulted and stuck taxpayers with debt in the billions of dollars. But until then, most owners who had sold homes cashed out beyond their wildest dreams.
Thousands of dollars in past profits are still in sellers’ bank accounts or were spent on their own consumption. If the shaky buyer at the bottom of the pyramid should not have borrowed to buy an overpriced house, then the luckier seller higher up hardly worried that the cash-strapped fool was paying him way too much with unsecured borrowed money.
We created the cultural climate for this shared madness. Television shows advised how to “flip” a house after putting in cosmetic improvements. Real-estate seminars and popular videos convinced us that homes were not places to live and raise a family but rather no different from piles of chips on a Vegas table.
We created the phony populist creed that everyone deserved to own a house. So lawmakers got the message to relax lending standards in service to “fairness.” But Americans forgot that historically nearly four in ten of us aren’t ever ready, or able, to sacrifice for a down payment, monthly mortgage bills, home maintenance, and yearly taxes — and so should stick to renting.
The problem went way beyond real-estate fantasies. Five-percent interest as a return on our money was once considered pretty good — especially inasmuch as a factory or farm on the other side of the banking equation could not really stay in business paying 10 percent in interest to banks for its necessary borrowing.
If we all spent more time focusing on what we ourselves should be doing right rather than affixing blame on others - we would discover improvement.
Of course, we should reform Wall Street and Washington — and punish severely the crooks in both places. But Americans should remember that Frankenstein was not the name of the monster but of its creator.
There is a good reason why we need to find the people to put some blame for this. I can sum it up in one word. ACCOUNTABILITY .
There is now way in the world if this happened under a Democrat's Administration you would be pulling out this line it is not time to affix blame to someone. You and Fox News would be placing blame for this on every Democrat you could find. But since we both no you cannot lay the blame at their feet, we have this new change of heart.
Why is it when 9/11 happened you and the Republicans were quick to blame Clinton for everything. Now that the general public thinks this was brought on by the Republicans, it is look away, this is no time for punitive actions, we need to solve the crisis, look away. I for one am not buying it. This is the constant double standard that Republican's use.
Cornel West said it best when he said this about the Republican's:
"The sad thing is, you know, when they talk about welfare, they always talk about personal responsibility. But when it comes to their actions, who takes responsibility? Hardly anybody at all. That's what you call not just moral inconsistency. That's what you call unadulterated hypocrisy."
Posted by: Greg | Friday, September 26, 2008 at 08:31 AM