Who Has the Right Plan for America's Economy?

Whats wrong with America

Sorry to use you as an example, Phil, but to me, you represent what is truly wrong with Americans and politics. You take the easy way out, to repeat the garbage without doing a little of your own research or coming up with your own view point. It is so easy to blame a single person rather than step back and look at the system as a whole. So saying Phil Graham is at the top overlooks the problem and ergo, one cannot have solve a problem without understanding the problem.

The key to the financial issue is complex, no doubt, but one can easily point out the biggest contributor to the problem and the issue that started the downfall: the housing market collapse. Within that are a number of factors starting with Fannie and Freddie. They are hybrid organizations. They are neither private company nor are they a government agency. There are something in between and that is a big part of this problem. Had they been a company, they would have had to behave in a more responsible fashion. Had they been a government agency, they would have been subjected to more oversight. Add to that, the goal of the Clinton administration to put more lower income people into home ownership (under a Republican congress so blame is equal). Now you have a recipe for disaster. Mortgage companies sell mortgages to home buyers then in turn sell those mortgages to Fanny and Freddy. Fanny and Freddy has restrictions on which mortgages they would buy so mortgage companies sold the ones they knew they could resell. Prior to Bill's home ownership initiative, Fanny and Freddy would not buy risky mortgages like Interest only, etc. but after Bill's initiative, they started buying up risky loans which in turn had mortgage companies drooling because now they had a whole new HUGE market to sell to that was not available to them before. For interest only or adjustable ARMS, everything was peachy for awhile until the adjustment period when lower income, credit risky folks found themselves unable to afford the adjusted payments. Needless to say, 1) this crisis has been brewing for a long time and 2) as homes foreclosures started to increase nothing was done and 3) as homes foreclosed, people spent less thus slowly putting an undertow on our whole economy.

The point is, blaming Phil Graham or any single individual in this mess is dangerous as it does not address or even reveal the full scope of the problem. So when you point to deregulation, yet in the video clip I linked to above which I don;t think you watched, you have lawmakers literally saying that there is no problem and that a government appointed auditor is wrong. How do you watch that and think the government should have been more involved when it clearly shows that our government is incapable?