"EIGHT YEARS OF FAILED ECONOMIC POLICIES" - LEST WE FORGET!!

How many times have we heard the mantra of "eight years of failed economic policies" in the past year? Has anyone thought to challenge that statement, or is it to become like the unchallenged mantra of the early nineties that "Reaganomics was a complete failure"? If you say it often enough, it must be true!

Let's see....In the last eight years we've had 9/11, an on-going war in Afghanistan, an on-going war in Iraq, and an on-going war on terrorism world-wide. During that same time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average exceeded 14,000 and the U.S. economy was the best it had ever been! What happened? The answer is simple. We had more than eight years of failed economic policies, but NOT the policies claimed by the leftist Democrats and their water toting mainstream media!

By failing to allow the "Big Fat Oil Companies" to drill for oil off American shores and in the Alaskan wilderness, and by making it virtually impossible to build new refineries because of overwhelming environmental regulations, all enacted by the Democrats, a recipe for economic disaster was put into place. Oil shortages, due to world-wide demand, caused oil and gas prices to go through the roof. Not surprisingly, those prices adversely affected every segment of the economy and put an unbelievable strain on the pocket books of all Americans. So much so, that the next domino to fall was the national housing market, which included millions of homeowners with mortgages they weren't qualified to have and which they could no longer afford. Because of the glut of inventory of un-sold houses, housing values tumbled, making the value of financial portfolios, stuffed with un-sound mortgages, to tumble along with them.

Which brings us to the next failed economic policy. FannieMae and FreddieMac, begining around 1996, and continuing through 2008, operating without proper governmental regulations, which were blocked by the Democrats in Congress, pushed and forced mortgage lenders through the Carter Administration's Community Reinvestment Act, to approve sub-standard loans to unqualified borrowers. They then bought and re-packaged those loans and sold them to unwary investors,who wrongly assumed that because they were backed by FannieMae and FreddieMac, they had the backing of the United States government. When it became apparent that these loan packages were worthless, the major financial institutions around the world that bought into the fallacy suffered unimaginable losses which could not be overcome. Many of these financial institutions were simply unable to continue to operate, and, as a result, were forced to close, causing another domino effect in the global credit markets and a severe constriction of credit world-wide, and our current crisis!!

So, when someone shouts "We don't need four more years of the failed economic policies of the last eight years", please tell them they are almost correct, except instead of eight, it's the last sixteen years of failed economic policies brought on by the liberal Democratic Party that we don't need!!