What makes Barack Obama such a great President?

[girl gone mad]

44. More revisionism.

TARP was not repaid. We've been through that many times now.

The stimulus bill was not Keynesian. It was insufficient and far too heavily weighted toward tax cuts. The infrastructure portions were a mess, with lots of wasteful pork.

Banks should have been preprivatized, jr bondholders wiped out, sr bondholders forced to take haircuts, lots and lots of credit writedowns should have occurred back in 2008. Rather than bailing out our corrupt and parasitic financial sector the rescue efforts should have focused on the productive parts of our economy. An outsized financial sector is the core problem. Saving the status quo has only made matters worse. Economist Steve Keen has done a lot of very convincing work in this area. The solution is higher wages and less financial debt. We preserved a precarious economic model based on low wages and high financial debt levels. It will topple again.