Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washi

Hmmmm........ And what kind of government put us into this mess? Eight years of Conservative Bush Administration. Let's see, so we want a candidate that has very successfully started and ran a business. Weeeeeell, there is Al Gore. :lol:
wrong again numbnuts
Bush is not a conservative nor did he govern as one

In '06 we had 4-5% unemployment, 14k Dow. After libs snaked their way into power the wheels sort of fell off.

It's that simple, huh? Why do you continue to prove how ignorant you are on this subject? Here is an instant education, all in one place:


Friday, October 24, 2008
U.S. EditionWSJ.com

Greenspan Admits Errors to Hostile House
By KARA SCANNELL and SUDEEP REDDY

Alan Greenspan, lauded in Congress while the economy boomed, conceded under harsh questioning from lawmakers that he had made mistakes during his long tenure as Federal Reserve chairman that may have worsened the current slump.

In a four-hour appearance before the House Oversight Committee Thursday, Mr. Greenspan encountered legislators who interrupted his answers, caustically read back his own words from years ago, and forced him to admit that, at least in some ways, his predictions and policies had been wrong.

Returning to Capitol Hill amid a financial crisis rooted in mortgage lending, Mr. Greenspan said he had been wrong to think banks' ability to assess risk and their self-interest would protect them from excesses. But the former Fed chairman, who kept short-term interest rates at 1% for a year earlier this decade, said no one could have predicted the collapse of the housing boom and the financial disaster that followed.

Lawmakers weren't buying his explanations. "You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime-mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), chairman of the House committee.

Lawmakers read back quotations from recent years in which Mr. Greenspan said there's "no evidence" home prices would collapse and "the worst may well be over."

The 82-year-old Mr. Greenspan said he made "a mistake" in his hands-off regulatory philosophy, which many now blame in part for sparking the global economic troubles
. He quoted something he had written in March: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief."

He conceded that he has "found a flaw" in his ideology and said he was "distressed by that." Yet Mr. Greenspan maintained that no regulator was smart enough to foresee the "once-in-a-century credit tsunami."

The hearing made clear how far the 18-year central banker's reputation had fallen from the days when he was hailed for his stewardship in keeping inflation low, holding growth up and helping pull the world through financial crises, including the Asian crisis and other turmoil a decade ago.

Two and a half years after Mr. Greenspan left office, Congress is drawing plans to remake global financial regulation with the kind of tight government hand that he long opposed. At the same House hearing, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, himself a longtime free-market Republican, said he supported merging his agency with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, creating a beefed-up supercop to police certain previously unregulated financial products.

Amid the barrage of questions, Mr. Greenspan dodged and weaved. He would begin meandering responses in the elaborate phraseology that once served him so well, only to be cut off as lawmakers sought to use their brief question time for sharper attacks.

In an echo of the Watergate hearings 35 years ago, Mr. Greenspan was asked when he knew there was a housing bubble and when he told the public about it. He answered that he never anticipated home prices could fall so much. "I did not forecast a significant decline because we had never had a significant decline in prices," he said.

Mr. Greenspan's confidence in the resilience of home prices -- shared by most in the industry at the time -- became a critical forecasting error. The belief spurred more mortgage underwriting because lenders assumed that borrowers living on the edge could always refinance or sell their homes for a profit if they ran into trouble. Instead, with home prices now falling, hundreds of thousands of homeowners are facing foreclosure. Prices nationwide have fallen nearly 20% since their 2006 peak, and many economists foresee a further decline of 10% or more in the next year.

The difficulties of forecasting served as a key defense for Mr. Greenspan. The Federal Reserve, with its legions of Ph.D. economists, has a better forecasting record than the private sector, he said, but that's still not enough to prevent every problem. "We were wrong quite a good deal of the time," he said. Forecasting "never gets to the point where it's 100% accurate."

Subprime mortgages led to a global economic crisis in considerable part because of securitization, in which the home loans were sliced up, packaged into securities and sold off to investors all around the world. Anticipating such a crisis is "more than anybody is capable of judging," Mr. Greenspan said.

If the best experts were not able to foresee the development, "I think we have to ask ourselves, 'Why is that?'" Mr. Greenspan said. "And the answer is that we're not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance."

He continued, "There are always a lot of people raising issues, and half the time they're wrong. The question is what do you do?"

Lawmakers, stung by having to put $700 billion of taxpayer money on the line to rescue the financial system, were unmoved throughout the hearing, and eager to make their own points about the situation.

Rep. John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky, hit Greenspan close to home, calling the avid baseball fan one of "three Bill Buckners." That was a reference to the Boston Red Sox first baseman whose flubbed handling of a routine grounder cost his team the 1986 World Series. Former Treasury Secretary John Snow and Mr. Cox, who sat alongside Mr. Greenspan, also got tagged with that comparison.

Lawmakers homed in on a warning the late Fed governor Edward Gramlich gave Mr. Greenspan in 2000 about potential problems in lending practices. Mr. Greenspan said he agreed but added that if the matter was of such high concern, a Federal Reserve subcommittee would have presented it to the full board. He said that never occurred.

The former Fed chief also said he was often following the "will of Congress" during his long tenure and did "what I am supposed to do, not what I'd like to do."

Mr. Greenspan has spent much of this year defending his record at the Fed, trying to take apart arguments to show how his decisions were far less significant than outside forces in causing the crisis.

The central bank is blamed for too vigorously spurring home buying through its low short-term interest-rate targets, which were initially set to fight the economic slump after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-01. Mr. Greenspan maintains that the development of China and other factors fostered low rates -- around the globe and not just in the U.S. -- contributing to a housing boom that was world-wide.

Lawmakers took Mr. Greenspan to task for his advocacy of credit-default swaps, an unregulated kind of insurance contract that can help investors protect themselves against another party's bankruptcy. Credit-default swaps were also used as a way of taking risks and are widely blamed for adding to financial-market instability. Rep. Waxman asked pointedly, "Were you wrong?"

Mr. Greenspan said, "Partially." While he cautioned the lawmakers against excessive regulation, he said credit-default swaps "have serious problems" and, after some pointed questions, agreed they should be subject to oversight.

The treatment was a striking contrast with one of Mr. Greenspan's last appearances before Congress as Fed chairman, on Nov. 3, 2005. "You have guided monetary policy through stock-market crashes, wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters," Rep. Jim Saxton (R., N.J.) told him then. "You have made a great contribution to the prosperity of the U.S. and the nation is in your debt."

Greenspan: From the ArchivesWhen Alan Greenspan retired in 2006 after 18½ years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, his economic legacy seemed secure: Inflation and unemployment were lower than when he took office, and during his tenure, the U.S. experienced just two mild recessions and its longest expansion on record. But today, that legacy is under fire amid the housing slump and financial crisis. Here is a look back at Greenspan as covered in the Journal:

Greenspan Defends His Legacy
04/08/08The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis (By Alan Greenspan)
12/12/07Greenspan Book Criticizes Bush, Republicans
09/15/07Greenspan's Legacy Rests on Results
01/31/06How Alan Greenspan Came to Terms With the Markets
05/08/00Setting Fed's Policy, Chairman Relies On His Own Judgment
01/27/97'Irrational Exhuberance' Concerns Greenspan
12/06/96Fed Shows Concern Over Housing
05/19/05MoreVote: How much is Greenspan to blame, if at all, for the financial crisis?Text: Greenspan's prepared remarksReal Time Econ: Partisan Tone Dominates HearingReal Time Econ: Greenspan Finds Flaw in IdeologyMarketWatch: Tough to Believe Greenspan's Disbelief.
 
Hey Lindsey get a clue:cuckoo:CNSNews.com - Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washington Post Poll


This is something we how really follow politics have know for ever:clap2:

I knew we remained a right of center nation - but two to one? That has to be some kind of temporary anti-Obama backlash perhaps?

At any rate, the political sands are quickly shifting again -and sooner than I had thought following the last election.

2010 is shaping up to be a very interesting election cycle...

Except it isn't two to one. What are the independents? Irrelevant? The question assumes that all Democrats are LIBERALS, and we are NOT. Many are INDEPENDENTS (and registered as such) who lean more to the left than right. The poll is skewed.
 
Hey Lindsey get a clue:cuckoo:CNSNews.com - Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washington Post Poll


This is something we how really follow politics have know for ever:clap2:

This is why America is in such bad shape. America leans conservative and they had no one to represent them in the 2008 Presidential election. Now we've got a Marxist idiot running the country and the people just get more and more angry. Maybe a conservative party will rise from the ashes in 2012 to save us, although it may be too late by then.

SaRAH
SaRAH
SaRAH
SaRAH

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Your best bet at this point is Mitt Romney.
 
If you ask me questions like, "do you want the government to stop spending so much money" I will look like a "conservative" as well.

This would worry me if Republicans were conservative.

Or, I wouldn't hate the GOP if they practiced what they preach.

Then again, if you'd read the Washington Post/ABC questions that were listed in my post, you'd KNOW that's not what was done. But you have fun in Sealy world.

Here is the entire poll. The subject of the OP took into account only the last 3 questions. The others hardly show the Obama administration about to fall off a cliff, people.

Washington Post-ABC News (washingtonpost.com)

Kudos for the media blitz, though. If you Google just Washington Post/ABC poll, the first three pages are ALL right-wing publications and/or blogs.
 
Seems that quite a few Americans call themselves conservatives who aren't really that conservative, hell, John McCain calls himself a conservative and yet how many 'real' conservatives agree with that?
 
Hey Lindsey get a clue:cuckoo:CNSNews.com - Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washington Post Poll


This is something we how really follow politics have know for ever:clap2:

This is why America is in such bad shape. America leans conservative and they had no one to represent them in the 2008 Presidential election. Now we've got a Marxist idiot running the country and the people just get more and more angry. Maybe a conservative party will rise from the ashes in 2012 to save us, although it may be too late by then.

SaRAH
SaRAH
SaRAH
SaRAH

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Your best bet at this point is Mitt Romney.

Palin was never the conservative that her instant fan club labeled her last August.
 
Hey Lindsey get a clue:cuckoo:CNSNews.com - Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washington Post Poll


This is something we how really follow politics have know for ever:clap2:

I knew we remained a right of center nation - but two to one? That has to be some kind of temporary anti-Obama backlash perhaps?

At any rate, the political sands are quickly shifting again -and sooner than I had thought following the last election.

2010 is shaping up to be a very interesting election cycle...

Except it isn't two to one. What are the independents? Irrelevant? The question assumes that all Democrats are LIBERALS, and we are NOT. Many are INDEPENDENTS (and registered as such) who lean more to the left than right. The poll is skewed.

45% of voters in '08 identified themselves as 'moderate' (versus liberal or conservative) Obama won them by 20 points.
 
America is a liberal nation, you were around during the last election? Being conservative to most people doesn't mean being partisan dumb like the wingnuts who gloat over a stat that has little real value and then post it like they have shown some profound point.

I would wonder how the participants in the survey would define conservative or liberal? Given the use of ideological words on this site chances are their values would not match the conservatives who say 'no' to everything and accomplish nothing except war and debt.
 

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