Forget about the vote. Republians (Bush Party) caused this mess in the first place. The spending they burnt in eight years is insane. As if that's not insulting enough Bush spent the majority of his time removing controls and restraints on big corporations/banks. The Bush party should be lined up and stoned to death.
Bush did little to stop the decline, but he sure as hell didn't start it. Go back a little further, like, Jimmy Carter and Clinton further. It breaks down like this:
-Carter passes the Community Reinvestment Act, which gives incentives to help low-income, unreliable-credit buyers get into homes, whether they can afford it or not.
-The act is a moderate success, up until 1995, when the Clinton Administration added massive provisions to the CRA, in a failure in social engineering of epic proportions.
-CRA 2.0 allows the securitization of CRA loans that contain suprime mortgages. The bill forces banks nationwide to issue $1,000,000,000 in brand new subprime loans. It created an "equal opportunity loaning environment", where next to no-one could be denied a loan, even if they had an abysmal credit record, and no paper trail to confirm that they could actually pay back the bank.
Why? Because banks were legally required to issue subprime mortgages, or suffer major fines and penalties.
-By 2004, 92% of subprime mortgages were variable rate, guaranteeing reckless loans in vulnerable communities, without guaranteeing that the interest rates will always be that low. Home ownership rises, and so do home prices.
-With rising home prices, guess what else rises? Interest rates! Interest rates explode, people can't keep up with their house payments, especially those low-income house owners who were promised a way to get money, due to the spike Up until CRA 2.0, home prices were tied with inflation. After CRA 2.0 the two detach, and housing becomes more expensive, causing massive speculation, and then wham-o! The bubble bursts, creating a debt-vacuum.
Very rarely will you hear me coming to the aid of GW, but to say that his administration has been totally deregulatory is false. He pushed for a bill in 2003 to oversee Freddie and Fannie, and the Democrats in Congress shot it down.
He hasn't done much to help, but this isn't entirely the fault of Republicans either. Isn't it a little naive to think that in politics, there's a wholly good, morally upstanding party, and a wholly corrupt one? Corrupt is corrupt, and it doesn't choose sides.