Originally Posted by djplong

This is exactly my point. It "low taxes" was the cure-all, we'd be swimming in it (taxation as a percentage of GDP is pretty damn low right now - lowest since the 1950s if I remember correctly)

Yet how come high-tax, high-union Canada is doing so well? I know part of it was that they didn't have the same kind of real-estate problem we did. But that's because THEIR regulators didn't allow their banks to do what ours did.

I read an article today about Canada shrinking it's government in the 1990s, setting the stage for more stability. It didn't even mean losing a lot of government jobs - it was more along the lines of handing out fewer and smaller checks to people.

So it's not apples and apples. Canada didn't have Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Thanks for the clarification.

Those two were just one part of the problem. NOBODY from EITHER party played the role of 'the grownup'. Nobody told people "No, you can NOT afford this mortgage". Even that was more complicated than it sounds. I know personally of a case of a woman trying to "flip" houses - but she was putting serious work into the house she bought. The real estate agent kept telling her that she couldn't put her house on the market until X was done to it - then Y had to be done, then Z. The agent had only HER interests at heart (a bigger comission) and ignored the fact that the owner was running out of capital. Unfortunately, the owner 'woke up' a little too late and the collapse was underway. On the good side, she didn't lose EVERYTHING but she DID lose what she had hoped to work up to her retirement nest egg.

[I went off on a tangent with some personal stories but decided to delete them for brevity]

You could euphemistically say we got carried away with the concept of "The American Dream". You also hear people say they thought real-estate would never go down. How old were THOSE people? Did they not remember the real-estate problems in the early 1990s? Have our memories gotten THAT short?