This comment identifies parties responsible for actions, but these actions are taken by democrats and republicans alike, no president in my life time has failed

This comment identifies parties responsible for actions, but these actions are taken by democrats and republicans alike, no president in my life time has failed to engage in these practices. This is not a political response. Recessions are not "just how economies work". Recessions and depressions are the product of the monetary shenanigans of the central bank, as laid out well in the Austrians Business Cycle Theory. The short overview is, easy money means government gets to spend and the money creation process includes showering those at the top - wall street banks and government connected entities-- with new money that they are expected to "invest" in the economy. The problem is this is malinvestment and distorts the markets. You can only do it so long and you invariably create bubbles. A recent example of this I have lived thru is the dotcom boom...when it went bust, interest rates were put below the cost of money, and banks were mandated to make bad loans (prudent underwriting of loans was considered "racist" by democrats in the late 1990s so CRA was changed, later analysis showed it wasn't correlated with race after all.) Then under Bush the spigots were really opened and suddenly you have very cheap money to buy houses with. Buying a house with cheap federal reserve money was a form of the carry trade--- where you buy an asset worth X and then pay it back with increasingly lowered value dollars. This resulted in the housing bubble and of course the housing crisis.... which was "fixed" with massive amounts of even more easy money. This money is now going into wall street again, this time into equities, and hedge funds and venture capital. It will eventually bust again. IF you don't have an easy money policy then interest rates follow the supply demand dynamics of a market, and it will self regulate. Even if you don't think it will perfectly regulate itself (and that's true) it will tend to, rather than get way out of whack. What we have now is an economy that is has gotten so out of whack and never been able to properly recover itself by unwinding the last two bubbles.