Elinda wrote:
Demea wrote:
Elinda wrote:
Obama, as you're aware, stepped into a huge mess.
At what point does this become facetious? Not that I put much stock in opinion polls and the like, but when can we officially declare that the "Blame It On the Last Guy" horse is dead?
![Smiley: grin](http://zam.zamimg.com/i/smilies/grin.gif)
Life isn't simple.
Politics aren't simple.
Economics aren't simple.
There are some laws and Executive funded actions that take 1 month to kick in, some take a year, some take 5 years, some take 10 years, some take 25. Ditto on how long their effects last for after they first take effect. Some decisions and actions and legal changes are still washing out the system 75, a hundred years after their inception.
Take the legalisation of abortion. Whether or not you accept that that has been a factor in the massive drop in crime rate 25 years afterward, there's no question that our present society and economy and culture is a different place than it otherwise would be if that law hadn't changed all those decades ago. In the first world we are now missing a small but significant amount of the native population that otherwise would be there. Our population is better educated and has more assets, and other children are born to more mature parents, because some children just weren't born earlier, to younger parents. And some women are feeling a lifetime of regret or guilt for the child that never was, that they miss now, that they wish they could take back that previous decision.
There is also a small but significant portion of severely disabled people who weren't born from the combination of modern prenatal diagnostics and abortion. Maybe that is society's gain, maybe that's society's loss.
Take the legal change that women would be allowed to keep their paying jobs upon marrying. From 1900 to 1950, adjusted for inflation, house prices stayed almost totally flat and unchanged. If I recall correctly, houses cost the price of 5 years of the average male wage. From 1950 house prices started to rise just a little. After 1970 house prices started to rise, and rise more steeply as they went along, particularly picking up in the 80s, and just kept on an upward logarithmic rise.
What jumps out at me is that house prices started going up in trend with more and more women entering the workforce. So I have made a completely unresearched and unfounded hypothetical that the bulk of houses are bought by couples simply bidding against each other at auction with as much money as they could afford to pay on monthly mortgages. That they would buy the best house that they could afford. As women gained more rights in the paying workforce more couples became double-income households. Women's wages rose, boosting those double incomes further. So that the money that couples were prepared to pay for a house rose too, pushing house prices up and up over inflation.
Of course, there are other factors that have created housing bubbles along the way, especially in relation to the desirability of other investment options. But over the long term, statistical graphs of house prices and women's incomes are very suggestive.
I present to you these examples of policy change having long term, indirect, or unforeseen repercussions and consequences. So if you want to play the praise or blame game in politics, you CAN"T be simplistic about timeslines, and cause and effect. You have to track what actions had what effects, over time, over the whole system, the whole nation, and many washing out over the whole world in the long term. I'd bet pretty much all examples have bad effects as well as good ones, even if the good heavily outweigh the bad.
And in economics, I see a lot of good and bad chickens that come home to roost in 10 and 15 years. Not contained within a silly little 3 or 4 year political cycle. I should have mentioned another one. Education. What you decide now you will be noticing most 25 years later. And it will be affecting you till that generation is dead.
Edited, Sep 3rd 2009 1:31am by Aripyanfar