Some points of clarification ... by gimleteye

A reader wrote, "... about those trust fund babies like yourself that have never really sweat a payroll." In fact I grew up "sweating a payroll". For readers..
who follow our blog, here is more fact. My father, an immigrant from Hungary who lost his mother and father in the Holocaust, arrived in New England with nothing. I was raised in a family that struggled at first and in a manufacturing business he started-- scavenging machinery together from scraps. I worked in that business summers in school, from shipping to running machines. After graduating from college, and several years working in China in the 1970's, I returned to work full-time "sweating payrolls". There were about 65 workers when I started, a sharp recession we struggled through, and about 350 on payroll when the business was sold. I negotiated union contracts and sweated strikes and organizing attempts at a factory I started in North Carolina where I also sweated payrolls. At one memorable moment, a protester tried running me over with a pickup truck shouting, "Dirty Jew!" To clarify for other readers; some of my best friends are Republican. They are unrecognizable from the extremists who have taken over the party. As a point of historical reference; those who read this blog know I have plenty to say about the Democrats culpability in the mortgage meltdown. But in today's post (below) the facts are: in 2001-- when George W. Bush was president and Florida homebuilders and Jeb Bush was agitating-- the neat confluence of housing policies and fiscal policy by the Federal Reserve triggered a housing bubble that led to catastrophe for millions while enriching the few. Jeb Bush and Florida Republicans played important roles in supporting the jeopardy to millions of Floridians.