Columnist Gil Smart writes under “Blinded by the bubble”:
“From the Obama administration, we’ve seen expensive attempts at stimulus…[The stimuluses] have not made much of a difference…”
“It is no stretch to say that without the housing bubble, there would have been no Bush economy. Now the bubble is gone; now the emperor stands, revealed in his nakedness. And now the nation must address the core issues, which were there all along: The rich are getting ever-richer, while the majority are (sic) treading water, if that.”
WATCHDOG: Without the Recovery Act and TARP, the latter enacted during the waning days of the Bush administration with mostly Democrat support, we might well have plummeted into a 1930s type depression rather than struggling along, despite about 16% of the population unemployed or underemployed.
Smart makes an excellent point concerning how the housing bubble momentarily masked the failure for real wages to raise and gave the middle class the illusion that everyone was growing rich.
