but the best part of it was, I'm afraid, quite necessary or a continuation of older policies. The bank bailout was necessary. The stimulus admittedly had a fair bit of unrelated things in it, true, but having *a* stimulus bill was necessary, which was always going to cost a lot, and some of those unrelated things were education spending which was also needed. And you may have noticed the recent studies pointing out that the stimulus did work (or at least parts of it did). Continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was also kind of unavoidable. As for the health care, I don't much approve of the way they handled any of that, I must say.

I think one can fairly criticize the Dems for having failed to sufficiently acknowledge that if you have two foreign wars plus an economic crisis requiring stimuli, you have to be extremely stingy on everything else if you don't want to create serious problems for later generations. A good part of that was Bush's legacy - though as people have pointed out in this thread, some Democrats went along with it - but the responsible thing to do would've been to be the bigger man and not follow Bush's example (in fairness to Bush, not like he could know that the financial crisis would get so bad).

But "arriving in Bankruptcyville way sooner than expected", no, I don't really agree. If there's a reason why you'll arrive there sooner than expected, it's because you had all that additional spending during times of economic growth over the past decade, when responsible people should've remembered that Reagan had left the government debt fairly high, and should've paid that back more instead - but they didn't, and then a big crisis hit. The Dems didn't put the pedal to the floor, they merely didn't have the balls to step on the brakes hard enough.