I'd say we're already "withering on the vine," pal.

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More of the same? You mean the financial melt-down that occurred while Bush was still president? Obama hasn't been in charge even 20 months and his methods are being rejected by the right before they have even been given a chance to succeed.

The new congress hasn't been given a chance to either succeed for fail and the right is already willing to replace them with a bunch of fringe activists who have even less experience than the administration and congress they are rebelling against.

No, 2010 isn't the same as 2008 - neither will 2012 be the same as 2000 or 2004.

The democratic party has shrunk some under Obama and Pelosi, but they are still one party. The republican party has been split in two by the tea party movement.

I don't like Pelosi at all, I think we should get rid of her. But you don't pour the baby out with the bath water.

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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and religions." - Jlarsen

The GOP caused the economic mess we're in now and people will remember that. Obama is getting us out of it but it will take time. He's only midway through his first term.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Think of the way -- again, I'm not the right person to ask about politics, Jim, but think about what the dominant debate has been over this country for much of the -- at least the first part in '09, which was that the administration was doing too much for the economy too quickly.

What the president did was absolutely essential. Nothing would have been possible without it. Without the president of the United States and the Federal Reserve acting aggressively to stop an economy in freefall, help put out that financial fire, nothing would have been possible.

Now, you can look back -- and people will look back over time -- to say, could you have found a way politically to do more? It's hard to know the answer to that question now. But you can see the president of the United States acted with extraordinary speed and a lot of political courage, because he knew that all the things necessary to start to arrest that crisis, repair the damage, were going to be politically unpopular, difficult to do, and he was willing to take that risk, as he should have been, because that was the responsible thing to do.

JIM LEHRER: But any reading of any political poll right now shows that people don't believe that.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I think this is the basic tragedy of how you think about financial crises. It's very hard for people to appreciate, particularly for Americans at this time, what the scale of risk is, what the -- in terms of how bad things could have been, what was necessary.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/busin...ner_09-08.html

How was the economy in 2006, before Democrats controlled Congress?

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Indeed. It started in 1980. We've had some success since then, but only because of market bubbles kept inflated by outrageous flaws in our economic structure and criminal acts within certain industries.

Ever since republican leadership increased the debt to GDP ratio by drastically over-reacting to what were admittedly insanely high taxes, we've been in a generally downward spiral with respect to any real growth in our economy.

Reducing taxes was the right thing to do, but it was taken to the other extreme and failed miserably.

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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and religions." - Jlarsen

All that started in 2007 or thereabouts.

Who controlled Congress?

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The housing crisis caused by Bush tax cuts. Supply side defects.


To cut taxes for the wealthiest individuals is to invite them to place their augmented incomes in the hands of people who have no choice except to bet this new money on the available speculative site, in this instance on the housing/mortgage market. There’s no place else to put it if they want to get a return better than a savings account or a stodgy mutual fund. It was a “liquidity driven bull market,” as David Rosenberg, the chief economist at Merrill Lynch, puts it (FT 8/16/07). And it has regulated all others because the bulk of the surpluses generated by tax policy went there. When it turned, everything else did.
http://hnn.us/articles/41985.html

Do tell.

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I provided a link to an article that explains it. Why don't you read it, Mr Know it All?.

What do people who got home loans with nothing down or no income verification have to do with tax cuts?

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