Sunday, September 9, 2012

So Obama Inherited a Mess, Did He? From Whom?

For the past three and a half years, we have had to endure the nonstop whining of Barack Obama and his surrogates telling us over and over that he inherited the financial mess that required him to add trillions of dollars to the national debt, to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits for each year that he's been in office.
Now he is telling us that he needs another four years and trillions more in money borrowed from China to complete the clean-up of the mess he inherited.
Well, for once, he nearly has it right.  He inherited not simply a financial mess, but a historic financial disaster.  Even the most virulent anti-Obama partisans will admit that Barack Obama didn't directly create the 2007-2008 financial meltdown. 
But Obama's own claims that it was all the fault of his predecessor, George W. Bush, sounded a little thin the first time he uttered them, while now they appear remarkably transparent.  The source of the financial crisis precedes Bush by a number of years, and like many landslides, it starts with a small pebble being dropped that starts the whole thing.
Looking backward through the historical record might help us decide just who provided Barack Obama with the financial legacy he has to cope with if it wasn't Bush.

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