One thing you can always count on from comments on the Left, they are always fair, honest, factual,respectuful, decent, unbiased, truthful, original, transparent, considerate of others thoughts and feelings, logical, balanced.

Between ALEC and Norquist, the Republicans are allowing a special interest group and tax lobbyist dictate their public policy. No wonder most Republicans can't get anything right.

Thank God there is Karl Rove to set everything straight!!!

Thank god there is Al Sharpton to set everything straight!!!

Kraut should try some facts. Like proposing and signing on aren't voting for the actual bill. Promises that don't count aren't promises. Raising taxes doesn't reduce growth because we have the lowest taxes now. I can't believe they print the crap this idiot writes.

Congress and the administration got us into this mess and yet they can't figure a way to get us out. They spent the money like drunken sailors, every day, more programs come out of the Whitehouse and congress for spending more. What don't they get? If we raise taxes they will just spend more. They won't apply it to the debt. They will say they cut spending but what they mean is they will just cut the amount of INCREASED spending in the future.

Rule of thumb for Krauthammer: Republican policies are failing because they aren't crazy *enough*. That's as far as he'll go to criticize the party.
.
MrData, that AEI metric buttload of obfuscation has been disproven many times, notably in a study by two Federal Reserve economists that found the vast majority of the risky subprime lending in the private sector. AEI has ideological reasons for wanting to blame it on the GSEs and will repeat this falsehood ad infinitum. You've been rooked, dude.

Mr.Data, do you know that there has been no Fannie or Fannie reform since the crash? So, all of those governmental policies and federal laws that you claim forced the lenders to make bad loans are still in play. What has stopped the banks and lenders from lending today? They have trillions in reserve, so capital is not the problem. There are more unemployed out there today than before, so the lack unqualified buyers and low- and moderate-income home buyers is certainly not a problem. Government is begging the banks to lend, yet they are refusing. And there has been no Fannie or Freddie reform. So what is stopping them from lending?

Please Mr Data if you wannt to place blame properly for the crisis , I suggest you read a little further into what really was happening out there. Everyone has their own story, its just a matter of whose statistics you want to buy. Personally , I think the banks sent ther own dignitaries to work in government for decades, starting back in reagan era and continuing today. Blaming Big Government is really , really silly.
Look at the list I provided, that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the folks that went from Goldman, Citi, etc into cabinet positions responsible for de-regulating the very investment banks that they made billions from.

Some really good reading chked full of facts, mathematical not ideological.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/_p...

Historically, this correlation had been low, especially as
housing prices rose. But what would happen if the
nature of the loans changed (they were made to
borrowers with bad credit who put virtually no
money down), and then housing prices fell? Even
a slight decline in housing prices would pull borrowers
underwater, meaning the amount they had
borrowed was more than the value of their
houses. Then, the correlation would be high.
Everyone would default.
The experts who put together subprime CDOs vastly
underestimated the correlation of defaults. Why might they
have done this? Was it an innocent mistake, which
surprised the banks and rating agencies as much as it
surprised most investors? Or was it an intentional ruse,
which generated phantom profits and bonuses, even as it
sowed the seeds of financial destruction?

The banks and rating
agencies assumed that, although some of the mortgage
loans in the pool might default at the same time, the
likelihood of more than one-third defaulting together
was basically zero. In other words, they assumed the
correlation was low.

For centuries, scientists have searched for
ways to mix different materials to create
gold. In 1995, David Li, a thirty-something
math whiz from rural China, was doing
something similar with loans. Li was trying
to figure out how to mix risky loans together
to get risk-free ones.
Surprisingly, his great insight came from death. Li knew
about the “broken heart” problem, in which people die
more quickly after their spouses die. Li saw an analogy to
loan defaults. When one borrower defaulted, others were
more likely to default. Not everyone defaulted at
the same time, but the defaults were correlated
– they moved together to some degree.
Li used the same math that statisticians used
to model how people reacted when their spouses
died to model how different loans reacted when
one of them “died,” or defaulted. Li told the Wall
Street Journal, “Suddenly I thought that the problem I was trying to solve was exactly like the problem these
guys were trying to solve. Default is like the death of a
company, so we should model this the same way we model
human life.”
According to the math, huge amounts of risk
disappeared when you pooled risky assets together in a
CDO. The key assumption was that although some loans
might default at the same time, not all of them would default
simultaneously. For example, if you assumed the
chances of two-thirds of the loans defaulting at the same
time were close to zero, you could split the CDO into a risky piece (which would bear the first losses when loans in the
pool defaulted) and a safer piece (which would not lose
any money unless more than one-third of the loans defaulted).
Then, the safer piece would be rated AAA.

Unfortunately Mr Data your research int how "knowledge is power" was ideologically based and should go deeper. Because this crisis goes far beyond the realm of political party.

Ben Bernanke: Chair of the Federal
Reserve, was chair of the Federal Reserve
under President George W. Bush
William C. Dudley: President of New York Federal
Reserve, was Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs
Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff, was on the Board
of Directors of Freddie Mac.

Timothy Geithner: Treasury Secretary, was
President of New York Federal Reserve
Gary Gensler: Head of the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission, was a Goldman Sachs Executive
Mary Schapiro: Head of the Securities
and Exchange Commission, was the CEO
of FINRA, the Investment Banking
Industry’s Self-Regulation Organization
Larry Summers: Chief Economic
Advisor, was Treasury Secretary
not to mention;
Mark Patterson (William
Dudley’s chief of staff, who was a
lobbyist for Goldman Sachs), Louis
Sachs (a senior advisor to the NY Federal
Reserve, who was with Tricadia, a hedge fund
that allegedly bet against CDOs), and Laura Tyson and
Martin Feldstein (both of whom worked in previous
administrations and were appointed to President Obama’s
Economic Recovery Advisory Board).

In 2009, Wall Street firms
had revenue of approximately $433 billion, and paid
record compensation of $139 billion. The numbers for
2010 were about the same.
Consider focusing on Citigroup as one example.
Citigroup had more than 300,000 employees in 2008, and much of the $32 billion of total compensation the bank
paid was for salaries paid to lower-level employees. But,
as the chart in the handout shows, Citigroup paid $5.3 billion
of bonuses in 2008. A total of 738 people at Citigroup
received bonuses of $1 million or more. 44 people received
more than $5 million. The “Senior Leadership Committee”
got $126 million. And Citigroup paid these
bonuses even though it lost more than $27 billion that year
and had to be supported by the federal government with
$45 billion of TARP funds.

Next, banks began bundling these RMBS together in a
second kind of pool known as a collateralized debt obligations
(CDO). The banks and rating agencies used complex computer models to determine what portion of a CDO could be labeled AAA. The rating agencies then gave AAA ratings to
large portions of CDOs,even though the mortgage
loans backing the CDOs were subprime.
Subprime-backed CDOs were popular, because they had high credit ratings and
paid high returns.
Finally, as the number of CDOs grew, it became harder
to find enough new subprime loans to back new CDOs.
The credit default swap (CDS) was a tool to enable banks
and investors to bet on subprime RMBS and CDOs, without
actually owning anything. Instead, CDSs were side bets on whether home borrowers would default. CDSs are one of
a type of financial instrument known as derivatives,
because their value is “derived” from the value of
the underlying asset (in this case, home mortgage loans).
Financial institutions used CDSs to place trillions of
dollars of bets.

Do you know what a home mortgage
loan is? Do you know anyone who has borrowed money
to buy a house? Who lent them that money? Did the borrower
have to make a downpayment? Why? If a borrower
has a bad credit history, as about one in four people do,
then their loans are known as subprime. Ask them why a
bank would make a subprime loan? (Answer: the interest
rate the bank receives is higher, to compensate for the
higher chance that a borrower will default.)
Historically, banks that loaned money to home buyers
kept those loans, and bore the risk of default. Thus, banks had an incentive to make sure borrowers repaid them. This
is one reason why banks required a downpayment. It also
is why they charged subprime borrowers higher rates.
Over time, banks began bundling mortgage loans together
into pools known as residential mortgage backed securities
(RMBS). Large institutional investors, such as pension
funds, bought these RMBS. Because the RMBS included a
diverse pool of mortgage loans, they were deemed to be
safe investments. The credit rating agencies gave these
RMBS their highest ratings of “AAA.” Now, investors – not
the lending banks – bore the risk of default.

Blame yourselves. You are nothing more than a bunch of mooks.

Titled, "Facts expose Norquist Myth?" Facts with Krazheimer? Krazyheimer is a nutcase. If Norquist's pledge and power is a myth, why did almost every Republican sign it? The fact is, Republicans drilled for those loopholes and constructed tax shelters for the rich years ago and will not give them up as a stand alone resolution. There is absolutely no reason why they can't close and shut them down without trading for something. But Republicans want permanently lowered tax rates down to loophole levels in trade. As far as the Simpson-Bowles Commission, Obama never made any promises to abide by it's decision. The commission itself voted 11 to 7 in favor, but 14 votes were needed to send the plan to Congress. Paul Ryan was a member of that commission and voted against the final draft, so it failed. Krazyheimer has to bring up GOP failures because they are the sign that Republicans actually did something.

Efforts to blame the banks for the financial crisis are failing because they are not supported by data. The key fact is that, by 2008, before the crisis, over half of the 54 million mortgages in the U.S. financial system were subprime and other low-quality mortgages.

Revisionists blame housing policies More than 70% of these 27 million weak mortgages were on the books of government agencies, primarily the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When these mortgages defaulted in unprecedented numbers, they drove down housing prices, weakened most large financial institutions and caused the financial crisis.

Here's why it happened. In 1992, Congress adopted legislation that imposed "affordable housing" requirements on the GSEs. These required that 30% of all mortgages they bought from lenders had to be made to low- and moderate-income home buyers — borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities.

Over the next 15 years, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development — pushed by Congress — tightened and expanded this quota so that, by 2007, 55% of all mortgages the GSEs acquired had to be made to low- and moderate-income borrowers, including 27% to those below 80%.
USATODAY REPORT

The GSEs could find good mortgages at the 30% quota, but when it went higher they had to reduce their underwriting standards. By 2002, to meet the quotas, they had bought at least $1.2 trillion in subprime and other weak loans.
By 2008, just before they became insolvent, they and other government-controlled institutions held or had guaranteed 19.2 million loans, over 70% of the 27 million outstanding. In other words, the government's housing policies created the demand for these destructive loans.

What was banks' role? It wasn't until 2002 that Wall Street issued over $100 billion in securities backed by subprime or other weak loans. Recall that by this date, the GSEs had bought over a $1 trillion. The banks' number grew so that, by 2008, there were 7.8 million low quality mortgages backing bank-issued securities — less than 30% of the 27 million.

Given these numbers, it's obvious that factually blaming the banks (or Wall Street) for the financial crisis is simply a way to cover up a huge government error in policy stretching across three different political administrations.

As in this case, Government can often be the blame for a national tragedy it would rather not be blamed for. Our role is to make certain that facts are separated from fiction for the betterment of the nation’s knowledge base. Knowledge always has been, and continues to be, POWER. We are a much weaker and more ignorant nation of people with knowledge not based upon fact.

Wow! And this guy works for the Washington Post? What an idiot.

Scum of the earth lobbyist!! Is there any other kind?

More revisionist history. Norquist is a scum of the earth lobbyist.

Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers are only the tip of the iceberg in relation to the depth of influence on Republican legislators. They are only the most visible. Dems have their problems to, but I've never read one of Krauthammer's opinion pieces that actually gave a balanced view of the corruption, influence, and back alley deals that BOTH parties engage in.