"worth of spending cuts over the last six years of Obama’s term. Those, combined with tax hikes and the waning stimulus spending, acted as a powerful weight on

"worth of spending cuts over the last six years of Obama’s term. Those, combined with tax hikes and the waning stimulus spending, acted as a powerful weight on the economy" Not sure if I agree with this. Tax hikes and spending cuts are what's required to build back a damaged economy. These obviously worked over time, as we now have one of the best economies in decades. This combined with the regulations Trump got rid of to enable more fracking/keeping the price of oil way down. I remember all of the people on the local news that were interviewed just as everything was crashing that talked about how they outright lied on their application about how much income they were making to get a house/piece of property...and now went into foreclosure when they couldn't make the payments. "by leaving the housing market to spiral downward and households to struggle with their debts" We shouldn't be propping up anyone. Some things need to fail to recover properly. This was the right move. "As a Senator and presidential candidate, Obama had publicly supported more dramatic efforts to rescue homeowners, specifically legislation that would have allowed so-called “cramdowns,” where judges could slash mortgage debt in bankruptcy court" Why should anyone get bailed out for a making a poor decision? Most people will never learn from this and will most likely need to get bailed out again. "Even Donald Trump’s trade war—another needless self-own—didn’t plunge the economy into another downturn, in part because some people in power seem to have learned lessons from their past mistakes." I have to laugh about mentioning the trade war. Almost every Democrat candidate wants this because it will lead to less CO2 emissions from China if we are purchasing less goods. But when Trump enacts it, it's a needless trade war. "But this was decade was not a slow march to a happy ending. It was miscarriage of economic policymaking that left millions without work for far longer than they needed to be. If we remember that—and why it all happened—maybe we won’t have to go through it all again." Creating artificial demand by just throwing government money at it wouldn't have solved the issue any faster. I sure hope we've learned our mistakes from the past, but I already have seen politicians wanting to start forcing banks to loan out money to groups of people that most likely will never be able to pay it back...starting the ball rolling for another financial crises.