Maybe Obama Should Try Out Some Of Those 'Failed Theories'

What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed.

President Obama during Press Conference

Peter Wehner points out that not all of those 'theories' failed, and those that did bear the fingerprints of the Democrats:

The assumption here is that the economic policies of President Bush — above all his tax cuts, presumably — are responsible for the current economic crisis we face. In fact, the Bush tax cuts — especially of 2003 — helped trigger and sustain 52 consecutive months of economic growth, a record for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (exceeding 14,000 at one stage), real GDP growth of 17 percent from 2000-2007, and, in 2007, a budget deficit that had shrunk to just over one percent of the GDP, which was significantly below the average over the last four decades.

Then came the economic crisis of late 2008. There are various reasons behind its occurrence, from easy money to insufficient capital reserves by investment banks. But if you were to pinpoint one culprit above any other, it would probably be the policies pursued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) chartered by Congress, which own or guarantee around half of the mortgages in the United States. Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute flatly says that Freddie and Fannie were “the source of the financial crisis we are wrestling with today.” Other economic experts concur.

...President Bush, along with others like John McCain and Alan Greenspan, argued for reforms of Freddie and Fannie that would have been quite beneficial. But those efforts were blocked by Democrats. Indeed, a bill emerged from the Senate Banking Committee in 2005 that would have tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, but Senate Democrats killed it. For those interested: Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator at the time and did nothing to help forestall the impending crisis. He is in many ways inheriting an economic situation his colleagues in the Senate helped create. And as Wallison points out, contrary to conventional wisdom, deregulation did not occur in the financial sector and had nothing to do with the current financial crisis. So President Obama’s claim that the “failed theories of the last eight years” have gotten us “into this fix in the first place” is simply not true. [emphasis added]

Read the whole thing.

Time for Obama to stop campaigning and start leading.

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