psyopper wrote:And I'll turn the same thing around on you. Bush had 8 years to fix the regulatory changes that Clinton approved - he had 8 years to prevent the housing bubble but he chose not to. There was too much money in it, and the economy grew like gangbusters under his administration which made him look great.
How much time should be granted and which regulations should the current administration be starting on? He had thousands of places to begin, unfortunately he chose health care before deep water drilling. Besides, changing the regulations really wouldn't have prevented this (as you already note). An equivalent regulatory example would be driving under the influence (functioning BoP's), which thousands of Americans (BP/TansOcean/Halliburton) ignore daily, and I would venture to say kills more people/ hour than the oil industry does.
I will grant you that Bush could have tried to regulate the derivatives market that were unregulated under Clinton. But to blame it on Bush by himself (or to blame him chiefly) is totally unfair. Not any politicians on either side of the aisle foresaw the problems that occurred in 2008 (and only a handful of non-politicians). I completely disagree with you on motives, because even Clinton and Rubin (and former Fed Charmian Greenspan) thought deregulation was good for the economy, not because of the sinister motives you have stated. Obviously in hindsight, I would question their judgment, but not their motives.
Actually Bush did try and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (quasi-Federal agencies who bought mortgages on the secondary market that were loaned to people who could not pay them back). But the Dems killed in Congress:
Here is the NY Times article from 2003 describing the initial Bush proposal to prevent a mortgage crisis:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/busin ... &position=
By most accounts, Chris Dodd (who is retiring this year and is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee) killed Bush's attempt to control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There are plenty of other links on this if you want to search.
The claim that Obama chose health care reform before control of deep water drilling is ridiculous. If there was problem with MMS oversight, he could have fixed that without Congress. The idea that the Obama administration cannot walk and chew gum at the same time is a flimsy excuse for the reality of the situation (which is that probably very few (or no) Dems thought there was a problem with the current regs).
In addition to the Obama administration (who employees hundreds of thousands of employees), any one of 538 members of the House or Senate could have introduced legislation, and if they were Dem's it should have been easy to get it passed.