The 2008 financial crisis occurred at the end of Bush’s presidency, so obviously, he and his policies are to blame, right? Well, um, no, that’s not right. Obama stepped in and guided the recovery, so he gets credit for saving the country (or at least the auto, housing and insurance industries), right? Well, um, no, that’s not right either.

First of all, distilling this most complex economic study of what caused the crisis down to a simple he said /she said one-line position so it fits into a tweet or a comment on Facebook is exactly the broader problem we face in American political discourse where no one wants to take a long hard look at understanding the real underlying reasons that certain events have occurred, and instead everyone just wants to shout slogans at each other.

The roots of the crisis began long before Bush came along (we’ll get into that in a moment), and while Obama does deserve some credit for somewhat guiding the ship back onto a prosperous course (or at least being at the helm during the recovery), there are several issues that can’t be ignored either. Fact is, whatever decisions Obama made (and whoever was in power would’ve been forced to make some similar decisions), once we had bottomed out like that a cyclic recovery was bound to happen, as is the history and nature of financial cycles. And while measuring the true success of this recovery is a task similar to, and as difficult as, getting to the bottom of what truly caused the crisis (are we really recovered? with so many people out of the work force, so many on food stamps and other gov’t assistance, such large wage disparity?) it is impossible to ignore the signature force behind all of the numbers we see thrown around so callously to attempt to support Obama’s claimed recovery: the fact that we put it on a $10+ trillion credit card in the form of our increased national debt. But that, too, is for another day.

The real cause of the crisis though goes further back, before George W. Bush, into the 1960s and 70s, when liberal legislators forced banks and lenders to go into poor communities and lend money for housing to people that the banks would otherwise have deemed economically unfit for loans. Years and years of pressure on the banks, often masked behind the banner that home ownership creates better citizens and communities and therefore a better America, gained more and more traction on the left. Community funding organizations and government backing of loans all played into the pressure being placed on banks to make these sketchy home loans. On the banks part, never one to get themselves into a bad deal if they can help it, they figured out that they may have to go along with entering into communities they wouldn’t otherwise bet on, but in return they were able to get regulators off their backs in other areas. And then there were the fees. The banks might have to make low-interest, no money down, no credit check type loans to poor and minority borrowers, but not only will they pick up goodwill in other areas with the legislators for doing so, but they also embarked on a massive fee-regime, figuring out how to at least recover some of what they would lose on their less-than-ideal loans with a healthy stream of fees that the regulators couldn’t really object to, since, well, at least the banks were lending in those communities to begin with.

So we ended up going down this path of banks being required by the government to enter markets they wouldn’t otherwise have entered without this government coercion championed by the left. Eventually more and more bad loans were made. Little or no restrictions stood in the way of making the loan, and sellers were in a fee-feeding frenzy. When the dot com craze hit the activity reached a fever pitch as everyone in the country suddenly felt rich as their AOL stock soared, business boomed, and jobs were plentiful for everyone. But when the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000’s, it only took a few years and by the mid 2000’s those that bought more real estate than they could afford found themselves in deep water. Before we knew it, the bad loans won and the system blew up.

So who was left holding the bag? Well, if you listen to the mass media, and read threads on social media, the simple answer everyone on the left seems to think is that since Bush was in charge when this decades long process came to a head then it must be his fault! But that couldn’t be further from reality. Unfortunately, even the quick summary of what really happened doesn’t fit neatly into 140 characters or a Facebook comment.