Dear John: Save your breath.
Trying to convince Democrats that their wise old sage Bill Clinton had anything to do with the financial meltdown is a waste of time and energy. All you will hear is that the ’90s were a time of great prosperity.
To paraphrase Thomas Paine, “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
You are right: Clinton deregulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make more money available to home buyers. He also turned his pit bull, Janet Reno, loose on banks, accusing them of racism for failing to lend money to minorities for homes they couldn’t afford.
That was all part of his goal of 70 percent home ownership for Americans. You didn’t mention — and of course, that was not part of the smart-aleck remark from your reader — that Clinton and Newt Gingrich balanced the budget by using excess funds from Social Security. T.W.
Dear T.W. The economy was “thriving” because we had financial bubbles, first in the stock market and then in real estate. Bubbles are always great; the fallout is always terrible.
In the United States, we are now suffering from post-bubble syndrome.
The bubble in the bond market continues to this day. But it won’t last, either. At some point, bond prices will go down and interest rates will rise — perhaps sharply and uncontrollably.
In theory, the Democrats and Alan Greenspan had a great idea — making interest rates low enough so that more people could afford to own a house. “Everyone should own a house” was the mantra in the excessive ’90s.
In practice, however, this was a horrible idea — except if you were a politician looking for votes.
As you now know, a lot of people scrimped to afford homes in the late ’90s, only to lose them during the rough past years. So who really benefited but the vote-seekers?
Not the people who bought houses they couldn’t afford. Not taxpayers who had to bail out the banks that wrote mortgages. In fact, no one outside Congress benefited from Bill Clinton’s social and economic experiment.
But you really can’t blame Clinton. He was only behaving like a politician would. It was really the job of the Federal Reserve and Greenspan to control the excesses.
Think of it this way: Clinton was like a dog with the urge to relieve itself on a neighbor’s doormat. It’s the dog owner’s job — and the Fed’s — to curb such animal excesses.
Dear John: The reason Democrats want higher tax rates and refuse to eliminate the death tax is because they want to give money, goods and services to noncitizens who are physically in the US, as well as to US citizens. And the previously mentioned persons are (in no particular order) lazy, stupid and incompetent.
Furthermore, half the supervisors and managers who “work” for the federal government should be fired.
Why should I be abused and remain silent while all these other people get special treatment that is not available to me? R.P.
Dear R.P. You are an idiot.
Right now this country is going through a crisis. And if you believe it will be solved by just cutting off payments to lazy, stupid and incompetent people — in no particular order — then you are quite a fool.
The fact is, the US has a spending crisis. And it is spending too much in a lot of different ways.
But basically, we lived above our means for more than a decade, borrowed excessively, acted foolish, fought too many wars. And we are now paying the price.
But it’ll work out. The only question is when.
Send your questions to Dear John, The NY Post, 1211 Ave. of the Americas, NY, NY 10036, or john.crudele@nypost.com.