Who's to blame?

The question is regarding the current economic meltdown. The answer is anything but straightforward, owing to many complex variables, some of which were beyond anyone's direct control. That being said, there were conscious, deliberate policy choices over the past three decades that have enabled the environment in which the seeds of the economic crisis were sown.

Some commentators, such as Paul Krugman, point directly to the policy choices pursued by, and enacted during, the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s:

There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

Krugman concedes that the "proximate causes" of the crisis can be attributed to the past several years:

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

Robert Scheer at "The Nation" places the culpability on Clinton-era policies to deregulate financial markets, which had large bipartisan support:

Ronald Reagan's signing off on legislation easing mortgage requirements back in 1982 pales in comparison to the damage wrought fifteen years later by a cabal of powerful Democrats and Republicans who enabled the wave of newfangled financial gimmicks that resulted in the economic collapse. Reagan didn't do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.

In reality, Scheer is probably correct in citing the Clinton-era policies as directly enabling the current crisis. But what Scheer fails to consider is the way in which Reagan-era rhetoric and ideology laid the groundwork for a political environment in which the late 1990s legislation could be possible in the first place.