I wrote this draft quite a while ago, yet it resonates true in the final paragraph, even though my vision left out a coming pandemic. A very impartial review of who caused the financial crisis during the George W. Bush admistration is contained @ https://www.publicintegrity.org/.../roots-financial... A response below summarizes it well - "This is a long article, but it shows that sub-prime lending became a problem when non-bank lenders got into the mortgage market, and used predatory practices to make their money before the loans failed. The absence of regulations safeguarding consumers was also a major cause of the collapse. Laws that would have protected consumers were systematically opposed by Republicans in Congress (one being Charles Grassley)." I found another great article in the NY Times that pins the tail on the elephant in charge - Bush - and provided the name of the person Bush picked - Christopher Cox - here in the Google search box - Bush can share the blame for financial crisis - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/.../.../20iht-prexy.4.16321064.html
Sep 20, 2008 - WASHINGTON — For his entire presidency, George W. Bush has tried to avoid ... It avoided regulation of banks and mortgage brokers, leaving much of that ... erred in the first place by appointing two secretaries who had no background ... Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman from California.
The economy is great for the 1% and corporations, but the workers haven't received anything for the most part. $400 billion that came back from foreign places and tax breaks has mostly gone to buybacks that raised stock prices and dividends, making executives and stockholders much richer - precious little trickled down to the actual workforce. If Home Depot and CVS had devoted the money they spent on buybacks to staff raises, every employee would have gotten $18,000 more a year. McDonald's could have given a $4,000 annual raise to all of its 2 million employees. No one expects companies to treat workers that well, but unless success is more broadly shared, more Americans will sign up for extreme solutions. An economic system that turns a small minority into "winners" and a majority into "losers" will, sooner or later, bring about its own demise. This year, workers are getting average pay raises of only 2.7% - which is below the 2.9% rate of inflation. Do the math - are you a rare winner or just another of the many losers?
What is insane is how little Republicans remember when the market was plummeting in FreeFall after Bush left office and within months, by March, 2009, the market began the turnaround and all those consecutive months of job growth. That's the empirical evidence, but they apparently live in the fantasyland presented by Donald Trump! They don't insult us — they demean themselves with such name-calling! What crisis has Donald Trump had to deal with that he hasn't created by his own hand and mouth? Please don’t claim the pandemic, which he has tried to pin on China, Obama and Democrats, when his own words recorded by Bob Woodward prove what he knew in time to react, but chose not to.
Read Politifact (Pulitzer Prize winning website) and view their actual chart of GDP (Obama hit a high of 5.2 in 2014, which Trump currently only aspires to). Here's the link, though you won't like the headline - Donald Trump off-base in describing GDP growth on his watch (even though it was written in July, 2019 prior to Trump's high point of 4.2) https://www.politifact.com/.../donald-trump-base.../
Know what is not being reported when you are talking about the 'great' economy. Our national debt is about $19 trillion, because suddenly conservatives think adding 1.5 trillion debt to give a tax break to the top 1% is worth saddling our grandchildren with the cost, which continues to grow due to the 'unfunded' obligations such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. When you add them in, the debt is over $200 trillion. Conservative pundits think the economy is doing great - think again! The day of reckoning is coming and it won't be pretty. That doesn't even take into consideration Donald Trump's Make America Great Again, which is bringing us back to the days of Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn, when blacks had less rights than now, even further back to when the robber barons made their fortunes on the backs of workers who had no vacations, no 40 hour work week or 8 hour work days - all with no breaks — only now, many workers have NO job! When women had no vote - that's the America Trump wants to bring back - he hasn't even done any planning for the coming of the two Singularities, as he has basically ceded the AI future to the likes of China because he hasn't got a clue about what's coming in the future (he's only very smart in his own small mind, which is lost in the past) - the first will be when the economy leaves the majority of workers without a place to work, which is already here for many workers, while the second is when there will be an artificial intelligence that will be smarter than us and we will no longer be the smartest intelligence on the planet. That is what we should be getting ready for instead of a nostalgic plan to bring back the ugly past!