Republicans in 2006 accepted that there wasn’t much the president could do to reduce gas prices, but most of them think Obama could. Democrats show an even sharper shift; they overwhelmingly said that Bush could bring prices down, but few expect Obama to do so.
Ugly, coagulated sentences of this kind - of which there are many - may be no more than instances of the professional inability to write, which has become a requirement of academic life. But I think the objection to this kind of language is not simply aesthetic. Such clogged, periphrastic discourse testifies to an obscurity of thinking and purpose....Hear, hear!
In 1995, President Bill Clinton initiated the National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream to create 8 million new homeowners out of working class families, with a special focus on minorities, who historically had been priced out of homeownership.So it's all the Democrats' fault, right? Not so fast:
“You want to reinforce family values in America, encourage two-parent households, get people to stay home?” President Clinton said in 1995. “Make it easy for people to own their own homes and enjoy the rewards of family life and see their work rewarded. This is a big deal. This is about more than money and sticks and boards and windows. This is about the way we live as a people and what kind of society we’re going to have.”
The government alliance with public and private housing industry organizations opened the door for subprime lenders to prey on inexperienced, but eager, first-time homebuyers. The qualifications needed to acquire a home loan sank to incredulous levels. No down payment? Not a problem. No financial documents? That’s fine. Just sign here. Under Clinton’s policy, the national homeownership rate grew to 67 percent.
One of the few policies President George W. Bush extended from the previous administration was expanding the homeownership market through his Ownership Society initiative. Like Clinton, Bush also argued that homeownership helped eliminate racial disparities.She herself mostly blames others for her poor investment decision:
“All of us here in America should believe, and I think we do, that we should be, as I mentioned, a nation of owners,” President Bush said at the White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership in 2002. “Owning something is freedom, as far as I’m concerned. It’s part of a free society. And ownership of a home helps bring stability to neighborhoods. You own your home in a neighborhood, you have more interest in how your neighborhood feels, looks, whether it’s safe or not. It brings pride to people, it’s a part of an asset-based to society. It helps people build up their own individual portfolio, provides an opportunity, if need be, for a mom or a dad to leave something to their child. It’s a part of—it’s of being a—it’s a part of—an important part of America.”
Bush’s administration created the $412 million American Dream Downpayment Initiative for first-time homebuyers and committed additional funds to housing counseling. In giddy response, mortgage lenders accelerated their subprime loan offers to even more previously excluded homebuyers. Countrywide Financial led the charge, generating nearly $100 billion in subprime loans between 2005 and 2007, more than any other lending company in the country.
Our realtor and credit union loan officer convinced us to sign a five-year, interest-only ARM loan, since we intended to own the property for less than that time. They made it sound so easy, so simple, to make money on this secure, sound investment. We were plunging into the most sensible financial venture, like every responsible American should.She later adds:
Yet, every conversation Matt and I had regarding the condo felt mixed and uncertain. We wondered if it was because it just felt new and unfamiliar... We should have realized the aggressive pitch the realtor and loan officer was pushing on us was one that was being pressured on millions of other first-time homebuyers.
Of course, it’s easy to blame someone else, especially if they are anonymous: the banks and lenders of Wall Street who encouraged these millions of impossible subprime mortgages that had to inevitably fall. It was our poor timing to come in just before they did, just as it was serendipity for my parents to enter when the market began to blossom. It is not fair. It is not even cosmic bad luck, as the fortune-teller predicted. It’s just reality.
President Obama himself told a Nevada town hall in February 2010 that “tax dollars shouldn't be used to reward the very irresponsible lenders and borrowers who helped bring about the housing crisis.” At least that was Obama’s position until this month, when he announced a plan that would expand HAMP to include the real-estate speculators that helped inflate the housing bubble.
When is a job not a job? Answer: when it is a green job. Jobs in an industry that raises the price of energy effectively destroy jobs elsewhere; jobs in an industry that cuts the cost of energy create extra jobs elsewhere.
The entire argument for green jobs is a version of Frederic Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy. The great nineteenth century French economist pointed out that breaking a window may provide work for the glazier, but takes work from the tailor, because the window owner has to postpone ordering a new suit because he has to pay for the window.
Regarding the financial crisis, the president assigns blame to the lack of regulation. The facts are banks got into trouble making loans on real estate assigned inflated values to borrowers who could not repay. Loans were bundled into bonds and sold to investors. When not enough unwitting fools bought bonds, the big Wall Street banks put unsold securities into offshore special investment vehicles whose potential losses were not supposed to be a claim on bank capital. Other firms, like AIG, sold insurance against potential losses on bonds without sufficient assets to back up that protection.
When the loans and bonds failed, it turned out those special investment vehicles were indeed a drain on bank capital, and Citibank, AIG and others needed bailouts to avoid the complete collapse of bank credit available to the economy.
All this was a massive accounting fraud, something big public accounting firms were supposed to catch in audits of banks but didn't — a failure Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, passed in 2002, were supposed to avert.
The solution imposed by the Dodd-Frank bill is to ban propriety securities trading by banks and impose burdensome lending regulations on surviving community and regional banks, which were more victims of the bubble than malefactors in the crisis.
Proprietary trading had little to do with instigating the mess, and profits from trading actually helped big banks rebuild balance sheets more quickly. And now onerous regulations have hamstrung community and regional banks and are forcing them to seek buyouts by larger Wall Street banks, which caused the crisis and have little interest in lending to small and medium sized businesses that create jobs.
When faced with resulting problems, the president explains he is saving the country from unstable growth of decades past. Yet, economists of all stripes refer to the 20 years prior to the crisis as the "Great Moderation," owing to exceptional stability in economic activity and employment not before experienced in U.S. history.
President Obama persistently preaches that solar, wind and other alternative technologies will make America energy independent and sustain economic superpower status. Yet, any reasonable reading of the prospective economic viability of these technologies, and any assessment of the likely transition of the automobile industry to hybrids and electrics, indicate the nation will remain significantly dependent on petroleum for at least the next two decades.
Yet, with oil above $100 a barrel handicapping the U.S. economy, the president imposes regulations that all but shut down deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore locations where the real potential for new American oil supplies lies. Instead, he plows money into projects like Solyndra that independent financial analysts predicted would likely fail.
Americans pay at least 50 percent more than Europeans for health care, often with less satisfactory outcomes, because the federal government pays for more than half of health care but does not impose price and access controls as effective as those in Europe.
Obamacare simply doesn't fix what's broke. Instead, it raises taxes to provide more subsidies and imposes more mandates on businesses. Any economist will tell you subsidies and mandates to purchase a product raise its price, and health care is no exception.
Even when they’ve competed with and acted like more established power brokers, the digital ruling class are treated with kid gloves compared to other wealthy elites, rarely suffering the disdain aimed at amoral bankers and at Hollywood’s general venality. Instead, the creators of our iPhones, social networks and Twitter accounts are held up as tool makers and business titans....
The new plutocrats are unburdened by the obligations that come with existing large institutions; with no union presence, they don’t have to worry about anxious retirees or redundant older workers. Green pet causes that align with their financial interests buy more cover from the left, while conservatives, who rarely see anything wrong with extreme wealth, seem somewhat unconscious about the political orientation of the emerging new elite. Ninety-two percent of Facebook executive donations so far this year went to Democrats. This exceeds even the rock-solid support the Democrats enjoy among more established firms like Google and Apple, where support for Democrats runs to the high 80s.
The Obama administration’s opposition to the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA came despite intense lobbying for the bill by his party’s long-time allies in Hollywood. Whatever the bills’ failings, their defeat also formally introduced the new power of the digerati moguls and their millions of followers....
In California, the alliance between progressive Democrats and high tech is palpable. The digital elite has been a consistent backer of Gov. Jerry Brown’s jihad on greenhouse gases, helping finance the campaign against a 2010 measure intended to reform state’s draconian and likely job-killing energy and land-use laws. Google has emerged both as a key backer of the state’s climate-change politics and sought to profit by investing nearly a billion dollars in renewable-energy companies. These firms in turn depend on the state’s strict mandates on utilities to use “green” electricity for their revenues. It’s no coincidence that prominent valley VCs have been particularly active in alternative-energy firms such as Solyndra.
