When Bill Clinton was Govenor of Arkansas, his wife Hillary was hired to lobby him.

I'm not sure how that is different then taking a bribe. It would be like hiring the Judges wife as your defence attorney, and offering her a big bonus if you are found not guilty.

No, FDR did not cause the GD, and it is incorrect to attribute the S-H Tariff to FDR. Nonetheless, I would be surprised if even the most staunch FDR supports would say that the only thing he did to prolong the GD was to cut spending and balance the budget. The NIRA, for instance, was a disastrous piece of legislation. It exempted companies from antitrust legislation and artificially inflated wages.

In general that the fact that he sought to control and lower the amount of product that private owners made couldn't of helped that's for sure.

Like paying giant corporations to not produce goods. 

It's funny how everyone is ready to misread the post to defend FDR.

I did not say FDR passed the tariff; Neither does Sowell.  Hoover passed the tariff, which caused the massive unemployment.

The point is that if FDR had left the economy alone when he came to office, the Great Depression would have ended a lot sooner.  Instead, he expanded on Hoover's legislature with his "New Deal" and prolonged it.  Economists know that during a recession (or depression), there is a certain cycle of going low and then rising back up the businesses have to do before the recession/depression ends.  Government interventions slow that cycle down.

In M.A.S.H., when Charles whould not talk to Hawkeye or B.J., one of the worst insult Hawkeye says to get Charles to speak is "Your family voted for Roosevelt......four times!!!!!!!"

And, before anyone says it, I am not saying Roosevelt is worse than Hoover.  It is that Roosevelt was so popular when in office, as opposed to what people think of him now.

1. "Government interventions". This suggests that there is NOTHING the government can possibly do in an active manner to improve things, it can only worsen them. I strenuously disagree.

2. "as opposed to what people think of him now." He's still very popular with many people, although it's true people also remember the bad stuff like court packing and the internment camps. While it's true he was more popular then, I think it's a significant overstatement if you're saying he's not popular now.

Economists thought that our economic policies for the last 20 years would result in no problems what so ever and that low taxes and low regulation were ideal for the market.  Look where that got us. 

I don't necessarily think its a good idea to tout economists as the end-all-be-all of economic theory when they all ended up with egg on their face within the last 6 months.

Actually, I did not read your post...therefore, I could not have misread it. I only included it because it contained both of Tyagi's posts. Anyway, you are preaching to the choir. I have, in my own estimation, been the most staunch opponent of Hoover and Roosevelt's policies on VGChartz. Aside from the S-H Tariff, the wage controls that Hoover pressured companies to enact were also detrimental. The wage controls were as equally if not more detrimental than S-H.

What got us here is politicians (Democrats in particular, who would have guessed).  They pressure Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac into loaning to people who were not qualified for the loans.  The reasons the politicians gave for doing this was that many of the people were minorities.  SM&FM were not rejecting the loans based on race, but because they did not qualify based on income and credit.  Despite that SM&FM approved the loans due to political pressure.

The loans fell through when the applicants couldn't pay them, and that caused the housing market problem.  Funny that not very many people hear that version of the events.

When the housing market crisis caused minor economic problems, the media scared everyone by saying it was the next recession.  When people got afraid, it changed how they spend money, which is the most likely cause of the recession we are in now.

Now we are in a position like we were around 1930 (after the stock market crash, but before the depression started).  The economy is not as great as it used to be, but not bad either.  The economy will most likely stabalize on it's own.  There is a good chance, however, government will pass some ill-advised legislature that will send us into a depression.

I would go find quotes from people who support my statements.  However, when I did that earlier in this thread, people didn't read it properly.  I don't really have the will to do it this time.

Or possibly it's because that version of events is not in fact true.  This was handled on the first page(for me anyway, at 50 per); please rebut the WSJ article A_T found that refutes your story.   

I agree that government got us here, but I have different reasons.

It is specious reasoning to blame the crisis on the CRA and Sallie/Freddie. They may have been minor contributors to the crisis, but there are other culprits that, in my opinion, were the main contributors to this crisis. The Fed is culpable in its role in this crisis. It kept interest rates too low for too long. Also, you have a decision by the SEC in 2004, which is when subprime lending increased markedly, to allow certain banks to increase their debt-to-asset ratio. Some, from what I have read, had a debt-to-asset ratio as high as 50-to-1 which significantly increased their risk. The five banks that particpated in this program either failed (Lehman Brothers),  were acquired by bank holding companies (Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch), or converted to bank holding companies (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley).