Governments already “stimulate” business

In politics, it helps to have amnesia if one wishes to repeat history’s economic failures but offer them up in the audacious wrapping of something “new.” For example the current financial crisis is often incorrectly blamed on a laissez-faire approach to regulation. But only if one forgets it was the U.S. federal government as far back as the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter which first pressured banks to lend to Americans who were high credit risks, pressure then upped in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, and a practice then defended by too many Democrats and Republicans alike in past eight years.