Barack Obama has announced his payoff plan for all the deadbeat supporters that he and his pals forced the banks to give mortgages to and what a surprise - it involves fleecing the taxpayers to payoff their mortgages. What a deal for us!
I could wax lyrical, but I'll let CNBC reporter Rick Santelli do it for me. What a hoot - I especially liked, "The government is promoting bad behavior... do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages?" Barack Obama does because it's how he used to getting votes - buying them with taxpayer money. Too bad for you suckers who are actually paying off your mortgages - you get to pay for Obama's pals too.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you tossed a credit card into a meeting of Shopaholics Anonymous? You know - those poor sad people whose only stimulation comes from spending a whole lot of money they don't have on a whole of stuff they don't need? Well, watching the current shopping frenzy enveloping the Democrats in Washington is the closest I am likely to ever get to such a sight. As the Wall Street Journal observes, the Donks have been on the wagon for 40 years and have just fallen off with a bang:
"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus," but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm's point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.
We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it.
Hit the link, for some of the details of the Democrat shopping list, but I'm sure you won't be surprised. Every ridiculous purchase that you can think of has made it onto the list. What about the stimulus excuse? (Economic stimulus that is, not the the Donks creaming their jeans.)
Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.
Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren't likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President's new budget director, told Congress a year ago, "even those [public works] that are 'on the shelf' generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy."
The rest goes to the usual laundry list of buffonery and waste plus some juicy payoffs to Donk political supporters like government workers and ACORN. Here are some I like:
Here's another lu-lu: Congress wants to spend $600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars. Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles. ... As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.
Of course, once the hogs get their noses in the trough, you can also be sure that they are going to demand the same funding plus more in future years.
The U.S. National Debt was $930 billion in 1980, or 33% of GDP. Today it is $10.7 trillion, or 76% of GDP. The National Debt has grown by 1,150% in 28 years. With the planned fiscal stimulus (taxing future generations), the National Debt will reach 100% of GDP during the Obama administration. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 1998, their National Debt as a percentage of GDP was 65%. The Great Deniers say we are not Argentina. They say we are safe because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This is like jumping off a 20 story building and as you pass the 10th floor someone yells out the window asking how you are doing. You answer, “Good, so far”. ... Every single dime of the $1 trillion will be borrowed. The government will borrow $1 trillion from foreign countries, hand it out to their constituents, while encouraging them to resume borrowing and spending. Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel will force insolvent banks to lend money to companies, consumers, and deadbeats in foreclosure proceedings. The change we can believe in is - we will borrow and spend our way out of the largest debt bubble in history. Consumers and companies are acting rationally and trying to purge themselves of debt. The government will not allow that to happen. A massive additional dose of leverage will revive the patient. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Are the politicians running this country insane, unintelligent, or just so corrupt that special interests outweigh the interests of the American people? The current pork laden stimulus package will lead to a rerun of Japan's lost decade, with one vast difference. Our lost decade will terminate in a hyperinflationary collapse.
Well, you do what you can. By all means write to your "representatives" in Congress and tell them to get back with the Shopaholics Anonymous program. However, this is going to need a "tough love" intervention which hopefully won't be too long delayed - for all our sakes.
Of course, there was some bad news too. I stopped to look over the new houses being built in the subdivision and wasn't too surprised to find that the crews putting them up spoke Spanish exclusively and loved loud Mexican music on the radio. Now I don't know that they actually were illegal aliens, but I would bet that if I snuck over and posted a "LA MIGRA!" sign at the entrance to the subdivision, I could hold up progress for several days.
But don't worry - I'm sure this is just part of the new Obama plan for bounteous living. American citizens can kick back and watch free TV (in an ecologically responsible way) while waiting for the government checks to roll in as the wetbacks do all the work. What a plan!
At some point in the next four years, we will reach a situation where the majority of Americans pay no federal income tax but are able to vote themselves more goodies from those who do. The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. We now have a government offering trillion-dollar rewards for bad behavior to the financial system, to the housing market, to the auto unions and to individual voters. And the heirs to those Connecticut town meetings that Tocqueville regarded as the best form of government ever devised by man now underbudget their snow-removal costs, secure in the knowledge that the Feds will pick up the tab.
The Democrats caused the mortgage meltdown and John McCain warned that it was coming. What better issue could McCain have? Instead it's independent organizations who are trying to get the word out like this:
Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.
So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.
Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.
Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.
"It’s absolutely a conflict," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. "He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?
It was sure nice of the taxpayers to lubricate ole Barney's relationship with his boy toy.
They passed the big bailout bill today and the taxpayers are now on the hook for the tab from the Democrat meddling with the mortgage market. Are the Donks abashed by their foolishness? Of course not - they are busy trying to claim that it was a free market problem when of course, it was anything but.
*It was Democrats who ordered and commanded Freddie & Fannie to strong-arm banks into making billions of bad loans in the name of “fairness”.
*It was Democrats Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Jamie Gorelick who ran these institutions, looted millions from them and now advise Obama on economics.
*It was Democrats who accepted the lion’s share of the campaign cash that Freddie & Fannie spread around town in order to become “too big to fail”.
*It is Democrats who claim the problem stems from a lack of regulation by Republicans–yet they vehemently blocked John McCain’s Regulatory Act in 2005 and taunted administration officials for even saying there was a problem.
*It was Democrat Barney Frank, former whorehouse operator and parking ticket-fixer, who only last week held a cowardly anonymous voice vote to have Freddie & Fannie make even more bad loans.
*It was Democrat Charlie Rangel who pry-barred a $10 million “charitable donation” from the now-broke AIG insurance giant last year as the cost of doing business before his committee. That’s how they do things in banana republics, where, as fate would have it, Charlie keeps his tax-cheat condos.
*It was Democrats who promulgated the mindless Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that made a bad problem much worse.
If your drunken uncle drives into a ditch, do you just pull him out, dust him off, give him a gallon of gas and a gallon of moonshine, hand him back his keys and send him down the highway to get in a head-on with a schoolbus?
The Donks are acting like they just got the keys and some gallon jugs.
Before the Democrats' affirmative action lending policies became an embarrassment, the Los Angeles Times reported that, starting in 1992, a majority-Democratic Congress "mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and creative in stimulating minority gains."
Under Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001.
Instead of looking at "outdated criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."
Threatening lawsuits, Clinton's Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn't a joke -- it's a fact.
When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.
In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration's affirmative action lending policies as one of the "hidden success stories" of the Clinton administration, saying that "black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded."
Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn't get out of their loans by selling their houses.
A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it's gone off.
In Bush's first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.
Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no "concern about housing." How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can't repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "under heavy assault by the Republicans," but these entities still had "important political allies" in the Democrats.
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients. Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.
That's what comes of letting liberal tinkerers mess with just about anything and there's no excuse for letting them talk their way out of it. If John McCain won't belabor the Democrats for causing this disaster, the little people will have to do it, but Johnny could help his own cause a lot by lighting a few fires.
