What is the root cause for the American financial crisis, the Gov, or the Citizen?

The Government supported even encouraged predatory lending practices that allowed anyone with a beating heart to get a housing loan. Once the loan defaults started popping and vacant homes started piling up the housing market bubble burst and banks began to struggle under the weight of all the bad debts they were holding. Once the banks collapsed so did our economy and the Government had to intervene to help clean up this mess they IMO are wholly responsible for. Though you can point a finger at the Shmartnicks who borrowed money that they even in good times could barely afford. What were they thinking??

I hear ya @Cruiser, and agree entirely. I question how a person can come to the point of accepting a loan they could not afford. Just because a bank offers credit to those who don’t deserve it doesn’t mean it must be accepted. Is this because we’ve bred ourselves into a false sense of entitlement?

Let me ask you—do I have six eggs or half a dozen?

The government is the citizenry. This question creates a distinction where there is no difference.

The root cause lies elsewhere.

It lies in a difference of philosophies about bow people should relate to each other. That difference is played out over the years and results in policy that never stays still and that twists around itself like a basket of snakes.

Conservatives generally believe that personal responsibility is what drives people, and there should be no collective sense of responsibility to help those who are having trouble… unless you want to. Collective responsibility is applied mainly to things like the military. There’s an argument over whether education and environment and other things should be included in the purview of collective responsibility.

Liberals believe that, while personal responsibility drives people, we also have a greater collective responsibility towards those among us who are having trouble. They believe that we should mandate this assistance. Because of that, it makes sense for government to run the assistance efforts.

I believe that these basic beliefs determine how a person wants the government to behave in the world. And since the balance between people believing these different things is always in flux, our government philosophy and policies are also always in flux.

Democrats, for example, wanted to keep regulations on the banks to keep them from getting us in trouble. Republicans wanted to free the banks to make money and create jobs by removing unnecessary regulation. The Republicans won an election; regulations were removed; the banks went crazy; and we had a mortgage crisis that led to a huge recession.

But who knows? Maybe it started even before the Republicans got in power. My point is that we can always point fingers, but there is a flux in government, and that flux reflects the beliefs of the people at the time of the election. The beliefs are affected by advertising and only the rich can advertise, so perhaps people’s beliefs are in thrall to the beliefs of big businesses.

Then again, big business is not united in its beliefs and policy preferences. So there’s a lot move that must go into voter behavior. Instinct. The state of the economy. If things don’t get better, then whoever the Republican is will beat Obama in the next election.

But that’s what I think the root causes are.

I think it’s the bubble and bust economic ideology. Not steady growth that is consistent, but going gangbusters to the point it all melts down.

So you guys are telling me that none of our problems are related to the inner heart of the average citizen being addicted to dirty laundry and self entitlement combined with a lacking accountability and self indulgence? The state of our nation is purely economic policy and political posturing?

I think people project on to other people their own inner stuff.

I think most people are pretty good. I actually don’t believe we have a debt crisis.

The root cause seems to be in our schools. At some point, we stopped teaching children the humanities as serious topics. We now have generations of people who are upset all the time.

“I think people project on to other people their own inner stuff.”

How is that relevant to this discussion? I’m sure you have a connection but I don’t see it.

One of the consistent requests that schools make is for an increase in parental involvement. So is the problem in the schools, or in the lacking parental involvement?

My local YMCA had to cancel the baseball program for 10–11 year olds because not enough parents were willing to step up to the plate and be coaches. I’ve coached for six years and now that my kids are grown, it’s time for me to step away. Where are the parents?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies, sure, reading that back I was not clear.

I think, people are unhappy in general, and when they hear other folk saying stuff like, the “Liberal Media is out to Lie to you” or “The Republicans Hate the poor”. It resonates with them more on an emotional level than a logical one. People already feel crummy inside, so when you say, other people are crummy too, it sounds true.

It may well be parental involvement. Now that you make me consider it, it may be when Sputnik did an overflight and we switched to more of a concentration on engineering than the arts. These things probably build and snowball over time. Fewer people in the last generation care about the community, invest less in their children, and have children who invest even less.

But I think maybe we drop pre-calc, and teach more history.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about @Imadethisupwithnoforethought… the deepest roots of our current state of affairs. No one responsible on its own, but contributing to the “snowball”. The arts, humanities, all good investments to the inner psyche of a culture. What have we traded them for but an avoidance to our responsibilities to be conscientious citizens able to see beyond the current moment?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I just want to make sure I am being precise now that we are talking about it. I don’t think that things used to be “Better” as a society. I think people 80 years ago had big problems, and were slowly fixing them (segregation, Hitler, women’s rights).

But I think people absolutely had a sense that they were on a slow upwards path to making the world not suck, and they invested in making it suck less. We don’t do that now.

Do we agree that “sense” from the past was based upon hard work and reaping the seeds one sewed, and the “sense” of the present is based upon a false self entitlement?

America used to be known as The Land of Opportunity… Not the land of “I deserve it”.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies see, here is where I start drifting. It seems like, in a culture which is slowly getting better, you don’t even consider entitlement. You don’t worry about how other folks are doing because you are investing and working hard and you know you will get your due.

In our culture, we worry about that stuff. Its like, we stopped believing that things will work out in the end if we do our best. We started looking at each other at some point, and saying, why are you not pulling your fair share.

How on earth does one see “a culture which is slowly getting better”?

“You don’t worry about how other folks are doing…”

In a recent post about the financial crisis, I stated: Go say hello to your neighbor and offer a neighborly hand.… which has nothing to do with how I’m “investing and working hard and you know you will get your due” except that the “investment” made is on the human level, an not for personal gain. The investment is designed to elevate the local community, and thereby set a good example for other communities to follow.

This post directly stated: “This is not a blame game”, so I must reject the comment about “why are you not pulling your fair share”.

What I speak of is more akin to the society we create as depicted by C.S. Lewis Men without chests. We are teaching ourselves to devolve.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I am really sitting here wondering where I started to play the blame game. If I came across that way, apologies.

The sense of entitlement and lack of accountability bother me about society in general but I don’t believe they are at the root of the financial crisis. I think decades of foreign occupations/wars have bled us dry, more so than any number of social programs.

You named it all in your question.

I think it is wrong to consider Social Security as an entitlement. If you pay taxes, the gov. takes SS out of your check. How is getting money back that was taken from your earnings an entitlement? I think that is the wrong term for for SS. I will also point out that the gov. has taken money out of the SS account more than once. I believe politicians are the one to blame for that and most of the other monetary problems.

Our present problems are easily traced to irrational tax policy, irrational trade agreements, predatory banking, and two unnecessary wars. There probably needs to be a revolution in the U.S. so that as Thomas Jefferson says “the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots”.

The Tea Party is part of a major move towards a corporatist state similar to Mussolini’s Italy. Corporations already write legislation and freely admit to controlling our government. There is not too much time left before democracy fails, never to return to this continent.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I think @wundayatta has given you the ideal pragmatic and philosophical response on this one. Imo, the Goverment and the Citizenry reflect each other all the time and the image is always in flux and would always be in flux as @wundayatta I think has implied.

This present Goverment was created by those Citizens who voted and will be changed by them who will vote again and again. Meanwhile, our SOCIETY, made up mostly of those who did not vote, chose not to participate in creating their Goverment who would deeply affect their lives, would go on living and evolving for the better or for the worst—until more and more of them realize they have to take part in the process.

But to flat out answer your question myself, the root cause of the financial crisis? Probably the lack of vigilance and attention citizens give to all sorts of policies being made by any goverment at any time.

…the Gov, or the Citizen?...

Citizen… We elected the bums…

That’s why I gave @wundayatta a GA along with you @mazingerz88. It certainly reflects the last paragraph of my OP. But I also want to know the deeper causes as to why we vote the way we do, and if it correlates to other societal issues which contribute to failing educational systems encouraging citizens to play XBox rather than read beyond propaganda ballot amendments. Or worse still, to base opinions upon the spin doctor media from all sides.

Are people who grow up in fatherless families less likely to inform themselves and exercise critical thinking skills? Does the lacking quality of American workers encourage them to even care about researching topics beyond what the talking heads have to say about it, which is potentially another propaganda machine at the service of lobbyists?

I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t want everyone to vote. I’m more afraid of an uneducated vote than I am from a non vote. I believe there should be some form of testing system that qualifies people to vote only on the issues that they have researched both sides of thoroughly.

Has the quick fast and easy adhoc convinced everyone they are “winners” without doing so much as buying a lottery ticket? You know, in the early days of TV game shows, the contestants were learned men with a high degree of earned intelligence. Now we numb ourselves with surprise jackpot suitcases attached to the wrists of wanna be supermodels with the only skill required being able to scream “Deal or No Deal”.

I never blame anybody who grew up without a stable family to guide them. I hate the reckless and stupid things they do though. This is why I always say to a friend of mine who blames young people who ends up in jail that it’s not really their fault since their lives as kids were all messed up. What chance do they have?

It’s an endless cruel cycle and unless we figure out how to address this without political and religious debacles as well as infringing on basic human rights, expect the worst for the future.

“What chance do they have?”

They’d have a better chance if we realized that it takes a village to raise a child. Yet our village doesn’t step up to do such a thing for fatherless families, being more likely to encourage Desperate Housewives to do the same.

The village is dysfunctional. There is no consensus, mostly misguided agendas. If we keep on with this, we’ll touch the issue of abortion, welfare and all those things again. Not sure I wanna go there right now.

I’m not interested in the symptoms. And I’m barely interested in the disease. I’m mostly interested in the preventative life choices we can all face ourselves in the mirror with. We can either do that voluntarily, or be forced to face an even greater monster in the mirror later on.

@boffin Yes we elect them, but we are given the choices out of the “in” political crowd. That is the problem. I think nowadays people vote for the lesser of two evils. Not necessarily for a candidate.

The answer is GREED – greed on the part of big businesses, greed on the part of our congressional representatives that are bribed by the lobbyists employed by the big businesses. Big businesses paid well for the government representatives to reduce the controls that used to be in place that protected us from Wall St. financiers. Greed engendered by advertising that make a lot of people think that they need things that they really don’t. Greed built into the business of Student Loans (you can’t afford to attend college without a Student Loan unless you come from a wealthy family), once you get a Student Loan, you HAVE to pay it back – you can’t file bankruptcy to clear it, you can have your salary garnisheed to cover payments, your Student Loan will have penalties added to the total if you make late payments, etc. The deck is stacked against us. As Russell_ D_SpacePoet said, we are being ‘played’ when we vote – we are voting against a particular politician rather than being able to trust any politician enough to actually vote for one of them – because they will say anything to get elected.

I think the media has a lot to do with it— It seems like 50 years ago, or thereabouts, the media started taking the ‘bottom’ of society and making it entertaining—people are fascinated by the taboo and things that they can’t do in their own homes or lives, so watching was entertaining because it was safe to see inappropriate behaviors from a distance. Then the audience becomes desensitized to the inappropriate behaviors. 5 years later, repeat. Then repeat, then repeat. Then we get to today.

There aren’t that many top grossing movies or TV shows these days that center around people doing appropriate behaviors, are there? It seems to have gotten worse and worse- now uncouth and nasty are in vogue…

I think Americans are very tolerant or have become accepting of rude and degrading behaviors… then tolerate it in our government representatives, then tolerate stupidity—They complain but don’t do anything about it. They’re lazy thinkers and will just get worse if information is just continuously spoonfed to them.

Okay… better answer: There’s no one right answer. It’s all a combination of factors.

GA @Linda_Owl ! Add that to the stupidity of the Tea Party and you have a recipe for failure. The only people that pay are the middle class. I even heard on guy say that the poor aren’t paying enough taxes and the rich are paying too much. It is getting really creepy in Washington.

if things continue the way they’re going @Ron_C, there won’t be a middle class for very much longer

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies ” there won’t be a middle class for very much longer”

That’s the truth. What do you think will happen when we no longer have anything to lose?

Same thing that happens when a pregnant badger’s been backed into her sett as far as she can go. I wouldn’t want to be the one poking at her.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies people are really angry at congress especially the Tea Party conservatives, the weak Republicans that allow themselves to be pushed around buy them and the democrats that rollover and beg when backed into a corner by the same people.

In town hall meetings, voters are venting their frustration at their representatives and even presidential candidates that insist that corporations are people too.

Somethings got to give. I can see a revolt similar to what is happening in Greece and Spain. I can’t wait for that to happen here.