Read more: Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession (theatlantic.com)
As the more thoughtful poster stated, it may have not been the gas can, but it certainly was the match!
Posted on 02/27/2012 2:32:03 PM PST by VU4G10
Rick Santorum on Monday blamed the housing crisis on high gas prices.
During a campaign appearance in Michigan, Santorum said the housing bubble burst in 2008 because people could no longer afford to pay their mortgages because of high gas prices.
"We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices," Santorum said in Michigan according to Buzzfeed. "The bubble burst in housing because people couldn’t pay their mortgages because of $4 a gallon gasoline."
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
It wasn’t the cause; it was the trigger.
SWEEEeeeeet! (The “Cheerful” one)
Start with Romney & Paul in Iowa their vicious attack ads on Newt Gingrich when Newt was running away with the nomination, and Santorum came out of nowhere.
Then Newt rebounded in South Carolina and Romney went scorched earth again in Florida. Santorum cleverly won two beauty contests in Missouri and Minnesota, but beat Romney and Gingrich in Colorado, so blame the polls now, because voters "follow polls" and also blame the lack of debates and the media which is shutting out Gingrich!
Santorum has been the "severely" lucky beneficiary of Romney's scorched earch, up until now, but the Romney damage to Newt has been done and without media presence, Newt Gingrich's chances have been dimmed and the media are delighted to shut out Newt Gingrich, espeially Faux!!
The establishment all fear Newt Gingrich! The only agent of radical change!
Remove Romney and Newt Gingrich wins!
And you think Newt would disagree that gas prices didn’t help bring down the U.S. economy? He was out there with his Drill and Save Money bumper sticker. I changed it on my bumper to Drill and Save Jobs. I watched it all happen in CA and gas prices were the tipping point, or straw that broke the camel’s back or what ever cliche you want to use. Most I know people who were house poor who could have continued paying the mortgage if gas had stayed reasonably priced. I put full blame on the Democrat Congress that came into power in January 2007.
I remember the first couple weeks when the gas price was the highest. I live on a busy road where you could have an average of 40 to 50 cars an hour. One Saturday night the wife and I noticed we were not hearing cars anymore. When you are used to hearing them for years, the absence was deafening. We timed the interval to almost an hour between cars. No one was driving down town to get liquored up because the price shock to the system was that bad. That really hit people hard. We forget that now because of all the other bad things that occurred after that i.e.; the meltdown.
This is our problem:
1. Ron Paul - fiscal conservative but scary as hell on foreign policy.
2. Mitt Romney - looks good, but is a jerk and has only one reason for running: he wants to be President.
3. Rick Santorum - not ready for prime time, a possible disaster.
4. Newt Gingrich - a very good communicator with great political instincts with high negatives and self inflected wounds in his personal life.
What to do? I have no clue anymore. I like Newt, but if he can’t win the nomination what is plan B. That is what I keep asking myself. And so far here is my solution.
Support Rick Santorum and go down fighting. But we surely will go down, maybe by alot. God help us.
Read more: Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession (theatlantic.com)
As the more thoughtful poster stated, it may have not been the gas can, but it certainly was the match!
also because of the high gas prices, overnight practically, all the trades people had to jack up their prices to cover the cost and people stopped doing home repairs and building.....unemployment!
also because of the high gas prices, overnight practically, all the trades people had to jack up their prices to cover the cost and people stopped doing home repairs and building.....unemployment!
You should stop being so combative. You do know by now you are going to get Mitt Romney. Why? because Rick and Newt are splitting the vote.
Newt is not going to have a major comeback. Once you flame out in this race, you are done. If you have money, you can hang on, but it won’t help any.
After tomorrow, we will know if this race is over. Mitt wins Michigan and Arizona, he will be on a roll and the other two will be on the way out.
So, cut it out. No victory here for anyone.
Man this is ignorant.
The crisis started because loans were made to people who should not have qualified for the loans. People who did not even have enough slack in their income to absorb a gas price increase.
It was a symptom, not the problem Santorum! In statistics, correlation is not CAUSE you idiot! That’s a Democrat trick straight out of the book, “How to Lie with Statistics.”
I don’t care how socially conservative he is, he’s clueless on the economy and this country does not have enough time to find out if he can learn quickly enough.
Of course I don’t know if he made any qualifying statements that other factors might’ve been in play—but this comes perilously close to the logical fallacy of Post Hoc Ergo Prompter Hoc where the rooster thinks his crowing every day causes the sun to rise.
Whether or not so many should have be incapable of riding out that gas price rise is a seperate question than whether or not they in fact were. Whether the open gas can (over extended debt) or the match (gas prices) caused an explosion can itself become a circular arguement.
Intelligent people may debate it, but FReepers cannot be so idiotic/loony as to really think it can be dismissed with an insult.
Oh for crying out loud.
And our choice is this clown or Romney?
I’ve got to go find some antacid.
Inflation? WHAT inflation?
We don't buy food; we use the grass cuttings, and bark peeled off trees, to make soup.
As for gasoline prices being inflationary, that is ludicrous: we never buy gasoline; it's FREE! We just buy a new car every month, when the old one runs out...the way the Fed intended.
/sarc
1. Everyone was buying land & homes for ridiculous price. It did not matter if you could afford them or not. Undeveloped farmland in the middle of nowhere was bringing 8k to 10k per acre ten times what you would normally expect to pay.
2. Everybody, Bankers included believed we were in a state of Nirvana property values would never go down.
3. Homes were being used as every ones on personal ATM. There was no reason to pay down or pay extra there was better thing to the spend money on.
The Housing bubble would have burst even if Gas had been given away for free.
IMHO
First, the housing crisis began well before 2008. See the details at:
Governor Romney’s Housing Crisis (FR Exclusive)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2838983/posts
I think there’s slight truth there but it’s not the main cause of the problem. The problem is the artificial housing bubble that was created (and is currently blowing back up again) to get people into homes they COULDN’T AFFORD.
We can thank the Americans who didn’t do their homework or got greedy as well as the politicians who forced banks to lend money to people who had no business owning a home!
Santorum should have made gas prices a separate issue regarding Obama’s rejection of oil drilling/pipelines in this country.
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