Conservative Reasons for the Great Recession: Debunked

From Noah Smith's article: Conservative economic arguments since the crisis: A review. Noah Smith (a finance professor at SUNY Stony Brook, an economics PhD student at the University of Michigan, an academic editor in Japan, and a physics major at Stanford) writes:

"I want to go through the main economic arguments put forth by conservatives since the crisis, and try to be as fair and even-handed as I can to each. Maybe that's a hopeless task, but it's healthy to do these things once in a while."

Argument 1: "Fannie, Freddie, and possibly the CRA caused the crisis."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 5% right.

Argument 2: "Stimulus can't possibly work."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 0% right.

Argument 3: "Welfare is the main force prolonging the recession, by discouraging people from working."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 10% right.

Argument 4: "Uncertainty about government policy is the main thing holding back the recovery."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 15% right.

Argument 5: "Quantitative Easing will cause inflation."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 10% right.

Argument 6: "Deficits are dangerous and must be cut, but only by cutting spending rather than raising taxes."
Conclusion: I judge this conservative argument to be 50% right.

Noah Smith:

"To sum up, as hard as I try, I can't rid myself of the notion that conservatives have tossed out a lot of bad economic arguments in the last five years.

Paul Krugman writes: "Politicians seek out economists who reinforce their prejudices; news media are either propaganda organs or desperately afraid of declaring, in any straightforward way, that politicians are wrong, no matter how much what they say is at odds with the truth."

Obamacare isn't destroying jobs (by Jared Bernstein and Paul Van De Water) "Many of the jobs added in recent months have been part-time, and this has led critics of Obamacare to argue that the implementation of health-care reform is the culprit. Because the legislation requires employers with at least 50 full-time workers to offer them health coverage or pay a penalty, the bill’s detractors claim that it creates a disincentive to hire full-timers and that you can already see the shift to part-time work in the data....Recent data provide scant evidence that health reform is causing a significant shift toward part-time work."

Also read The Right cuts food stamps to pass corporate farm welfare and this, The simple economics of the declining middle class — and the not so simple politics