Almost every right wing nut I know is complaining that the library in THEIR community is being closed. The fact that their library was costing too much money per person than those in other communities did not matter. They wanted their library, that maybe 20 people visited per day, and cost more per visit than any other library in their county. It is truly fun to watch.

The Republicans basically created the current unemployment mess and as usual they want to avoid paying for the consequences. Three years ago, Democrats were talking about doing something that would have prevented the entire collapse of investment banking as well as the current recession. Republicans blocked it. Simply put Republicans insisted that subprime loan failures would have NO effect on the economy. So when Democrat suggested assisting those who had subprime loans pay the higher rates when the adjustable rates doubled their monthly mortgages, the Republicans blocked the option. It would have cost significantly less than the TARP bailout with the additional effect of stopping the collapse of housing prices and the drop in the stock market. We would not have had to spend a 143 billion dollars in a tax rebate (which went mostly to the wealthy, because you had to pay taxes to actually get a rebate) and the later 900 billion for TARP. A trillion dollar expense could have been avoided for anywhere between 150 and 300 billion dollars. And the concurrent trillion dollar aggregate drop in the value of U.S. housing could have been avoided as well as the collapse of the mortgage based investment instruments that caused the collapse of economies around the world because they invested in American markets.

The theory of small government caused the collapse.

As usual Republicans blamed those who took the subprime loans, rather than those who caused the government to allow them. This was the home building industry itself. Their market at saturated and first flattened out and then started to drop. Everyone who could afford to buy a home had. They needed to tap a new market. Those who could NOT afford to buy one.

Over the last ten years, probably everyone has seen the various commercials that went something like “Why Pay Rent when you can own for less” Anyone who has actually bought a prime rate loan knows this is not possible and owning always ends up costing more than renting. But the housing industry needed to make sales, or collapse. So they pushed the government to make housing affordable to those who could not afford housing. Those who could not afford to buy or could not quality were resigned to renting and simply dreaming that maybe someday they would be rich enough to afford one. A nice but unlikely dream considering that over the last 30 years, except for a relatively short period under Clinton, no one moved out of the economic class they were in except for the rich. The rich got much richer, but nothing at all trickled down.