re: I miss the 1980s

Ronald Reagan
Montana & Rice
Rocky & Rambo
MacGyver & Night Rider
80s Rock
Country music wasn't a bunch of makeshift hip hop

Was a great time.

Emilio Estevez was always discount Michael Douglas to me.

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Crime was mostly from the crack cocaine explosion. If you didn't live in the hood in some inner city it was probably lower than it is right now for you.

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Largely true, but the places where this was not true really got hammered. I'm thinking about New Orleans East in particular.

Also, I would suspect that the crack epidemic impacted the suburban middle class more than you might think... but it was the black middle class that got it.

Crack is actually a pretty cool invention, IMO. I hate snorting anything. The problem was not the idea of crack, it was who had the idea, i.e. the Manhattanite / Yankee intelligence apparatus.

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bullshite. "Dubya" started out his first term by mailing every taxpayer a one-time check, followed up with a big tax cut, and then started two wars. That combination of bad decisions led to Obama, and was the proximate cause of the destruction of the USA.

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The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Under Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.

These new HUD rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20 percent to 3 percent by 1995 and zero down-payments by 2000. What’s more, in the Clinton push to issue home loans to lower income borrowers, Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac
made a common practice to virtually end credit documentation, low credit scores were disregarded, and income and job history was also thrown aside. The phrase “subprime” became commonplace. What an understatement.

Next, the Clinton administration’s rules ordered the taxpayer-backed Fannie and Freddie to expand their quotas of risky loans from 30 percent of portfolio to 50 percent as part of a big push to expand home ownership.

Fannie and Freddie were securitizing these home loans and offering 100 percent taxpayer guarantees of repayment. So now taxpayers were on the hook for these risky, low down-payment loans.

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One of the things I miss about the 80's that has not been mentioned yet... Fighter jets always flying about.

I grew up in the country and they would routinely train out where I lived. It was like having an air show to watch almost every day. There always seemed to be a at least 2 or 3 jets flying everywhere due to the cold war. As a kid, it was awesome to watch and loved the sound they made.

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The A-10s based at England AFB would pass over the treetops at our place in the country in central St Landry parish.