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They tried to put bandaids on the economy but left the free market (translate criminal market) go willy nilly wild as it wished. In other words, instead of ridding the highway of bandits, they cleared the brush so that the bandits could see the hapless travelers better as they passed on the road. Naturally, robberies increased as they will here.
The only solution here is to raise wages and create jobs, good paying jobs for people. Forget about training. The solution here is on-the-job training. Get people into good jobs doing good things for our country. And stop that wasteful war.
The Bush administration was on its way to a terrible recession after the crash in the tech stocks when Bush took over. To get us out of that, they allowed changes in the law that would "increase home ownership" and stimulate the construction industry -- not coincidentally an industry in which they have many friends starting from Home Depot's then owners up to top developers in booming regions like Texas and Florida. Problem is, they forgot to raise wages so that people could actually pay for the houses that they built.
Case in point: Before Bush took office, we used to go for walks on a hill not too far from our house. At that time, it was just vacant land, lots of vacant land with a nice view of some of the long established communities in the area. The immediate housing around the hill was not very good. In fact, on one side, the housing looked like a shanty town.
A developer took over the hill, divided it into tiny lots and built one huge house after the other just as close together as possible. Basically, the houses are gigantic stand-alone condos with little patios in back.
The first houses ranged in price from $250,000 to $450,000 approximately. As mortgage regulations loosened and interest rates went down under the Bush administration, the developer built many more houses on the hill. They were essentially the same houses as in the beginning, but the prices rose a couple of hundred thousand dollars. We know because we looked at the early houses and then visited again later. In all that time, the houses didn't change, and wages didn't change. But the price of those monstrous houses went up.
During this period, we watched the paper value of our own house rise very quickly. My neighbor and I (we live in a working class neighborhood) used to ponder together how in the world families could possibly afford the houses in our neighborhood at the prices for which they were selling considering the stagnant wages.
As we see now, they couldn't. As we also see, greed does not pay if you look at things in broad economic terms. The wealthy class has been overly greedy. The little people buying the houses weren't the greedy ones. They were robbed by the bandits that the Bush administration let loose on them.
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