If your great grandmother was running, I'd consider voting for her. Housing bubble was caused by a push for getting everyone a house, starting in the 1990's. Banks were given a carrot and a stick - they were penalized for not making sub prime loans to low income, high risk people. They were allowed to offload those mortgages into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Big government caused the problem. They were allowed to offload those mortgages because there were no regulations preventing it - not big government... They offloaded the mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were Government Sponsored Enterprises. I think its something like 90% of all housing loans are owned or backed by the U.S. government. Anyhow, if banks couldn't sell their mortgages to the government (big government's fault), and didn't have incentives to loan to people who couldn't pay them back (again, big government's fault), we wouldn't have had to bail them out. Then it's only the bad half of "big government". Canada's government is bigger than the states, yet the much stricter regulations we have over the banking industry prevented banks from handing out these kinds of mortgages.