In an editorial yesterday in the New York Times they demonstrate once again how deep they are in the tank for the Democratic Party. The title of the editorial is Harmful Lending Practices and it attempts to describe the current financial crisis. It begins:
“One of the questions lurking beneath the surface of the national debate over the mortgage crisis, which has placed six million Americans at risk of losing their homes this year and next, is who is to blame.”
They proceed to round up the usual suspects
1. Major Share of Responsibility
- Reckless bankers
- Feckless regulators
- Greedy Traders
2. Some Measure of Personal Responsibility
- People who bought homes with mortgages they could not afford
The editorial goes on to advocate more government intervention, naturally, as the solution.
There has hardly been a more egregious example of government intervention causing a massive problem and hardly a more egregious example of it being uniquely owned by the Democratic Party, going back to FDR. Here is the history:
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D) creates Fannie Mae to help people get mortgages to buy homes. This is a classic example of It seemed like a good idea at the time. At its outset it seemed pretty benign, but like most government programs it lived on far beyond its original intent continuing to solve the problem long after the problem didn’t exist.
- Lyndon Baines Johnson (D) privatizes Fannie Mae. With his ambitious Great Society programs getting cued up he didn’t want to have Fannie Mae’s debt on the national balance sheet. It might make the national debt look bad, which it was
- James Earl Carter (D) created the Community Reinvestment Act – to encourage lenders to make more home loans to low and moderate income people. The same people, because of their economic circumstances who were more likely to default on their loans.
- William Jefferson Clinton (D) through his HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Attorney General Janet Reno put more teeth into the Community Reinvestment Act threatening banks with legal action if they didn’t increase lending to low and moderate income borrowers. Not wanting to be tagged as racists the banks (reckless bankers) comply.
- Barney Frank (D) and Christopher Dodd (D) block efforts to increase regulation and oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saying as recently as mid-summer of 2008 that they were both fine and not only that, but good investments. Christopher Dodd, meanwhile gets a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide mortgage.
So while the Times is calling for more regulation and oversight they never once mention any of the above. They mention lawmakers in general bipartisan language:
“Lawmakers, for their part, missed important chances to curtail some of these problems last year as the scale of the crisis was becoming apparent.”
Missed? Gosh darn it, how did that one slip by? They didn’t MISS anything, they actively BLOCKED IT! There is quite a difference between missing something and actively stopping it dead.
It is no wonder that the circulation of newspapers like the New York Times is crashing. There are other media outlets and the Internet that show just how fallacious these editorials are. With bigger and bigger government our liberties are being whittled away and the Freedom of the Press, enshrined in the First Amendment was put there to protect us from tyrannical government not to aid and abet it in the process.
That being said, this should brighten your day. Real Estate Downfall on YouTube
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