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No One Asked Me But…

No One Asked Me But…

by Dr. Larry Moses
Published January 7, 2009

No one asked me but… This marks the beginning of my second full year as a self proclaimed columnist and I hope to do better this year. While it seems to be a standard practice in January for every columnist to review the previous year, I do not intend to do that. However, there are a number of issues from 2008 that still perplex me. I believe I will with deal two of them.

No one asked me but…Where did President Bush go in 2008? I don’t mean just these last couple of months though that is a good question also.

It seems to me that President Bush abdicated his position near the beginning of 2008. As the race for the White House heated up, both parties began to attack him. Democrat and Republican alike portrayed him as incompetent at best and diabolical at worst.

I understand the attack by the Democrat Party. That is just politics. But the backstabbing attack by the Republican candidates was deplorable and shameful.

McCain and the Seven Dwarf’s who contended for the Republican nomination ran as much against their incumbent president as they did their Democrat opponents. They believed by betraying their party’s president they could curry favor with groups that were never going to vote Republican in the first place. When the Republican candidate stated, in agreement with the Democrat candidate, that their party leadership had failed for the last eight years why would he expect the American people to support the continuation of that leadership?

I am much very disappointed in President George Bush for allowing this to happen without fighting back. When the Republican Party repudiated Teddy Roosevelt, he fought back and ended up forming the Bull Moose Party. Now I am aware that Teddy was running for office again and George was not. But do you really believe Teddy would have allowed the attacks George suffered without striking back in some manner? Teddy would not have been “walking softly” and someone would have been hit with a “big stick”. President Bush’s failure to strike back merely validated both candidates criticism and did nothing to help the Republican’s cause.

Last week Vice President Cheney, who has been depicted as George Bush’s Rasputin, was on a Sunday morning news show. During the interview, he aggressively defended decisions made during the Bush administration. George was on his Texas ranch.

While I disagreed with many of Bush’s policies, it was refreshing to see someone in the administration willing to stand and defend those decisions. Here was a man doing what the President should have done. It made Bush once again look like the little rich college boy who played out of his league and lost.

In national news outlets this last Sunday, First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both made statements outlining the achievements of the Bush administration. But where the heck is George? While George laughs off the shoe attack in Iraq, the two ladies condemn the disrespect shown to the nation that liberated the shoe thrower from Sadam Hussein’s dictatorial rule. And George was on his ranch in Texas.

An old Marine Master Sergeant used to say, “Lead, follow or get out of the way.” Apparently George has decided to get out of the way.

There are many reasons to be disappointed in the Presidency of George Bush but the greatest is his failure to act Presidential this last year.

George, you are the President for twenty more days and it would be nice to see you act like it. The Democrats have the next four years locked up, and I suspect this will be the case for some time unless the Republican Party figures out what went so wrong so fast.

No one asked me but… The economy in 2008 is a real mystery to me. Until June, the economy seemed robust and everything seemed right in the world. Suddenly newscasters began telling us that the economy had turned sour. It seemed that everywhere one turned there were news articles about the recession we were in. None of the indicators the experts use to indicate a recession were evident but the commentators and writers continued to tell us that the county was in a recession. After three months of convincing the American people that they were in a crisis, the people began to believe them.

Now here is where my lack of understanding of the American economics may begin to show. I truly believe the American economy is a faith based economy. Our entire economic system is based on the faith the American people have in it. The value of American dollar is not based on gold or silver or any other concrete substance for that matter. A dollar is worth a dollar because you and I say it is. Why is a car worth twenty thousand dollars? Because that is what you are willing to buy it for and the dealer is willing to sell it for. Why was oil worth $140 a barrel? Because some speculator was willing to pay that for it is why. When the speculators decided they would pay only $40 a barrel, the market fell. It was always the same oil that came out of the ground at about nine dollars a barrel.

Why did the house on the hill sell for $420,000 at the beginning of the year? It sold for that amount because someone was willing to pay that for it. The same house is now selling for $290,000 or at least is being offered at that and probably not selling. The collapse of the housing market is interesting in itself. There are certainly a number of things I don’t understand about it.

I do understand that the blame should rest solely on the shoulders of the 2006 Democrat dominated Congress under the leadership Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. They pushed Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac into making home loans to people who could not qualify for conventional loans. This pressure started a flood of unsecured loans that were doomed to failure from the start.

What I don’t understand is why the Bush Administration did not aggressively let this be known during the recent Congressional and Presidential Campaigns.Someone needs to.

In addition, I am sure they will, explain to me why the housing problems could not have been solved by a massive renegotiation of loans. It would seem to one who probably doesn’t understand all there is to know about business, that it would have been better for the mortgage holders to allow the home dweller to stay in the home and continue to make the payment they could afford rather than to cast them out and have the home sit vacant with no payment coming to the holder of the mortgage.

Both the home dweller and mortgage holder were betting that the home dweller’s income would continue to rise and they both lost. In most cases, it was not that the home dweller could not continue to make the original payment, but they could not make the higher payment they had put off to get into the home in the first place.

While a renegotiation of terms might not have stimulated a continuation of growth in new homes, it surely would have alleviated the heartache of eviction and the economic banking disaster of loan failure.

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