Nitpicking Megan McArdle a bit

Megan McArdle is a good writer that makes a whole bunch more money writing than I do.

She writes a very good blog entry about the President’s State of the Union address. In it, she writes the following, that I feel the need to comment about:

The harsh way to put it is that the speech was an extended whine about how all the rich bankers and George Bush have screwed everything up.  That was fine campaign rhetoric when he was a Senator.  But it’s pretty weak when he’s been in charge for most of a full term–two years of that with a majority in congress.

You see this is the entire problem; the Democrats lead by President Obama, continue to perpetuate the outright lie that the President George W. Bush and the cabal of rich bankers caused the Wall Street crisis and that drove our economy into the ground.  This is nothing more than outright historic revisionism.  The truth is the so-called “bankers” took advantage of the situation.  As I have written on this blog and my previous blog, in 1973, the Democrats passed the community reinvestment act.  In 1993, the Democrats added the subprime clause to that act, which created the ability for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack to sell high-risk, adjustable rate mortgages to those who, under normal circumstances could not even remotely be qualified to get them.

There was one thing that did exacerbate the situation, that was the removal by Congress and not by Bush; the regulation that was supposed to prevent predatory lending conditions.  Furthermore,  The Republicans in Congress at the time, can be blamed for backing off an investigation, when the then President of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played the race card in response to a warning from the Bush White House that the housing market was about to crash.

Now the question as to the morality of the bankers is another story entirely.  However, the very idea that somehow a cabal of banks actually brought the economy down is weapons grade conspiracy theory nonsense.  The only thing that “The Bankers” and Wall Street did was take advantage of a situation created by the very socialists who are blaming the banks for the situation in the first place.