"It's just too bad that reality has a liberal bias."

I can give you a list of 30 things Americans would know if there were conservative media as well. And it wouldn't be anything like not covering the declining bee population.

Now to debunk the economic illiteracy here:

the economy grows faster and more sustainably under democrats, the deficit and debt go DOWN under democrats and the GDP rises under democrats while the majority of depressions and recessions have resulted directly from republican policies.

Alright, let's look at the last 35 years. The economy was absolute crap as a result of Carter's economy. When Reagan came in and instituted pro-growth policies including slashing taxes, we got long-term growth, and I don't mean the kind of "growth" we've had over the last 8 years. At one point, it grew at nearly 8%.

There was minimal stagnation under Bush Sr., but by 1992, real GDP was growing at 4.33%. The Clinton administration was also a time of economic growth around 4-5%, followed by a recession at the turn of the century. Then, we had 3-4% economic growth until halfway through W's second term. The 08 crash signaled the beginning of the big recession, and since then, we've been told that Obama's turned around the economy and it's fantastic now!

This is, of course, ignoring the fact that Obama is about to be the only President in American history who presided over a period when real GDP growth didn't hit 3%. This is truly amazing, considering the other presidents who only had one term still presided over periods of 3% real growth.

Source: http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year

So, why did the economy do well under Reagan and Clinton? One was a Republican and one was a centrist Democrat. Surely, they couldn't enact opposite policies and end up with clear economic growth. The fact is they both instituted pro-growth measures. Under Reagan, this included lower taxes, lower regulation, and mostly free trade, though he had some protectionist tendencies towards Japan. Under Clinton, it included free trade, welfare reform, lower government spending (in part due to Gingrich shutting down the government to prevent an increase in spending, to which Time put a cartoon on their front page with the headline "How the Gingrich Stole Christmas"), and stable monetary policy. There's a reason Clinton was a "centrist Democrat" and not a progressive liberal Democrat.

Now, when the recession came in the early 2000s, Bush didn't want the recession to happen under his presidency, so Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, instituted one of the worst policies in history that greatly contributed to the 2008 economic crash. The housing market crash was partly due to the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) that was passed under the Carter administration, but not fully implemented until the Clinton administration in accordance with the GSEs (Government-Sponsored Enterprises) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The New York Times itself printed in 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html

Here's a hint. When a mortgage company isn't giving low-interest loans to people, it's because the risk far outweighs the reward. When the government decides that a government-sponsored business should be forced to lend these high-risk mortgages at low-interest rates, then when it comes time to pay the money back, people won't have the money. Fast forward to 2008 and you have multiple banks that failed because Fannie and Freddie paved the way into a market for subprime loans to low-income individuals who wouldn't be able to pay them back.

However, the largest culprit by far was Alan Greenspan. Because Greenspan, along with Bush, wanted to avoid the recession in the early 2000s as a result of the dot-com bust, Greenspan artificially lowered interest rates and kept them low. Greenspan kept them low for a solid 3-4 years and created an entirely artificial economic boom. In order to understand why this is problematic, we must understand why the economy should have undergone the recession.

During a bust, what happens is you have a lot of idle resources. This is the basis for stimulus bills, where people argue that we need to pump money we don't have into the economy in order to get these idle resources back to work. However, this ignores why there are idle resources in the first place. During a boom, there is an excess of investment in goods being made for the future. As a result, you end up having excess resources in an industry that isn't effecient, so a recession is how the market re-allocates its resources to meet consumer demand.

Instead of allowing the early 2000s recession to take place, Greenspan artificially lowered interest rates for a long time (3-4 years), so there was artificial investment going on in a time when savings weren't all that high. This manifested as excess investment in homes and excess home-building, amplified by the fact that low interest rates resulted in the housing market staying stable during the recession. People thought that this was the new normal, that the housing industry was immune to market effects, so there was an excess of home buying that was allowed to take place because of federally mandated easing of credit in mortgage lending.

If you look at the economy now, we're barely getting by with interest rates artificially lowered to 0.25%. If you re-raise them to market rates, then you'd see how terrible the economy really is, and the 09 stimulus didn't help when it came to correcting resource allocation. We pumped $700 billion into resources that weren't efficiently allocated, combined it with a 0% interest rate, and we expect the market to keep chugging along without a crash on the horizon.

Note that these policies of Federal Reserve intervention, regulation, and government stimulus are not policies of economic freedom.

A quick hint on billionaires: if they choose to vote for a candidate because of his economic policy, chances are he knows what's best for his money a hell of a lot more than you do. Additionally, rich people vote for different candidates for different reasons. Some want a free market while others want regulation that they can help mold. This is the idea of corporate welfare that liberals supposedly despise, yet their party and a lot of big-government Republicans support.

/r/ShitPoliticsSays Thread Parent Link - np.reddit.com