That's correct dal, the Banks were forced to make loans to people that they traditionally would have turned down. George Bush was accused of racism and being cruel to poor people when he urged Congress to reverse this insane policy signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton. But banks and bankers aren't stupid, and they knew they would be left holding the bag when these people began defaulting on mortgages on homes they couldn't afford. So they legally bundled these bad subprime loans and dumped them on others, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then taxpayers and stockholders in these entities were killed when the House of Cards came crashing down. The crash was accelerated by outsourcing of millions of manufacturing jobs due to insane foreign trade deals. All of a sudden, people who had been able to make those big mortgage payments for a while, found themselves laid off and without a paycheck. That's when we began seeing record numbers of foreclosures that led to the meltdown.

We could try to then blame Bush for not stopping the major banks from bundling and selling bad subprime loans, but he didn't have the votes to do it. And even if he did, then the banks would have failed, and we all would have quickly learned that the FDIC does not have nearly enough to cover us when our banks closed and told us our savings were gone. It could have been much worse. Most of the ground work for the recovery such as TARP was started by Bush, and handed off to Obama.

It was not only predictable, it was absolutely predicted, but the Democrats did it anyway. People who had the dream of home ownership, but not the means to pay for it lost everything. Many of them still haven't recovered from the temptation that bankrupted them and inevitably ruined their credit. And the resulting Great Recession of 2008 almost became a global Depression, and cost all of us dearly in terms of job losses, losses in 401-K's and IRA's that delayed retirements or made retirement impossible for some, and a decade of depressed wages and chronic high unemployment.

So it remains true that the best welfare program and the best health care program is an economy where the majority of people can find and hold a decent job and earn enough to pay their own way. Driving corporations away through high taxes and excessive regulation won't accomplish that, and no poor man has ever employed me. Billy was employed as a teacher by taxpayers, so he sees a well that he thinks can never run dry.

A true sign of mental illness is any gun owner who would vote for an Anti-Gunner like Joe Biden.