I believe both parties are equally worthless, They are controlled by he extreme elements of both. The lefty socialists and the Right wing Elitists. Go fishing

Here is an interesting article that might give you some perspective on the ecomonic crisis.......


"As most of you news savvy college kids know, the stock market and economy has been down as of the past couple months. The culprit of this sharp down-turn is investor fears about investing in banks. The sub-prime mortgage crisis, a seemingly complex issue, has led to this. Before you glance over to The Litter Box on the next page because I’ve bored you to death, let me just take a second to explain this odd economic phenomenon.
In 1977, congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This law required banks to offer credit to everyone in their market instead of only offering credit to wealthier individuals, which was a common practice called redlining. In 1995, President Clinton signed into law an amendment to the CRA which created subprime mortgages. These subprime mortgages meant that people who wouldn’t traditionally qualify for the mortgage to buy the house could now purchase it at a much higher interest rate.
Throughout the past decade, this has put millions of people in homes that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to live in. President Bush would often gloriously tout that home-ownership is higher than it has ever been in U.S. history. But politicians experiencing glory like this would come at a dramatic cost to our nation.
What exactly are the dramatic costs? In 2007, there were 1.3 million houses that were subjected to foreclosure, a startling number that was up 79 percent from the year before. Additionally, in the first quarter of 2008, 21 percent of subprime borrowers were delinquent in their payments. These horrific numbers are definitely enough to worry an average investor, especially considering that subprime mortgages are worth a total of 1.3 trillion dollars (about 9.5 percent of the total U.S. GDP). Due to the foreclosures, banks and financial institutions around the world have lost about 150 billion dollars.
Who is to blame for this? If you ask a typical Democrat, they will tell you it was the evil banks who tricked customers into taking out ridiculous mortgages that they couldn’t afford. If you ask a typical Republican who is to blame, they will tell you that it would be the individuals who made the conscious choice to take out a mortgage that they knew they couldn’t afford and when their home gets foreclosed, they expect a government bail out. Which side is right? I think they are both right, and also both slightly misguided.
First, let’s examine why the banks would be willing to do this. A subprime loan carries an extraordinarily high interest rate and is given to people with horrible credit, which means they like to default on their loans a lot. There is a ton for the banks to lose. Conversely, there’s also a lot for the banks to gain. If the individuals they do loan these high interest loans to actually pay off, then the banks turn a huge profit, much larger than they would have made loaning to a lower risk borrower.
But it’s a gamble. Why would banks feel so comfortable gambling 1.3 trillion dollars? The answer to this is way back in the 1980s and early 90s U.S. Savings and Loan Crisis. During this time, more than 1,000 savings and loan institutions went belly-up. This was caused by financial institutions making high-risk loans to borrowers that likely couldn’t repay them. In the end, there was a very high rate of default on the loans, and financial institutions lost $160.1 billion. In addition, there were also a high profile political scandal where a financial institution called Lincoln Savings paid five Senators $300,000 to intervene with federal investigators on behalf of the Lincoln Savings CEO named Charles Keating. This scandal, known most commonly as the Keating Five, is one you will hear a lot about in the upcoming election as one of the bribed Senators is the presumptive Republican nominee for President, John McCain.
I apologize for digressing into my fears of a McCain Presidency. What do you think the U.S. government did after over a thousand financial institutions were bankrupt from their own incompetence? Of course, the government, really the taxpayers, bailed out the Savings and Loan industries by giving them 124.6 billion dollars. Many of the institutions that went bankrupt in the early 90s from this crisis are the same ones that are losing millions right now.
Back to the original question, why would banks offer subprime mortgages? The answer seems obvious to me that either the borrowers will pay up at the very high interest rate, or if they don’t and the banks start to lose money then the government will be quick to bail them out just like before.
Are the individuals who took out the subprime mortgages responsible? Definitely. Are the banks who gave out loans knowing they would likely never be paid back responsible? Of course they are. But the main culprit of this crisis is the federal government which created laws, like CRA, mandating that banks offer more loans to people that probably will default in little time. Then the government stepped forward to create subprime loans and told the banks that they had to offer the loans even though a large amount of borrowers won’t be able to pay for it.
What’s the solution to this problem? Since the government is most to blame, they should pay the most, right? Unfortunately, when the government pays it’s really you and me, and our families and all other good citizens in this great nation that didn’t do a darn thing wrong, paying. It’s not fair to penalize those who played by the rules to benefit those who didn’t. I think we need to stop this dangerous expectation of government bail-outs for companies and people that take advantage of the system. Therefore, I think the government should do absolutely nothing to alleviate this crisis. Remember it was government intervention in the first place that screwed up the lending industry to begin with.
In time, the financial industry will rebound as it always does, and those who had their homes foreclosed on them might even learn some personal responsibility. The free market always corrects itself, while the government consistently fails when it tries to correct anything. Maybe if the government had let the free market operate as it was intended to, then we wouldn’t have endured these financial crisises over the past twenty years.
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