This and this reminds me of why I cannot be a Democrat. Anyone who can seriously believe that it is the government's job to force banks to make loans to those who cannot afford them shows an inability to learn, at least from past mistakes.
From the first link:
A government department is again intimidating banks into lending to minority borrowers at below-market rates, all in the name of combating "discrimination." Welcome to the next housing mess.
The 1990s may have brought us supercharged politicized lending, but Eric Holder's Department of Justice is taking the game to an entirely new level, and then some. The weapon is a "fair lending" unit created in early 2010, led by special counsel Eric Halperin and overseen by Civil Rights Division head Thomas Perez.
To make a long story short, Perez et alia are using their ability to bring lawsuits on the public dime to force banks to make loans according to political criteria, rather than financial criteria.
Good lord, that's what got us into this in the first case: here we have an absolute blindness to financial and economic reality in the pursuit of a political chimera - economic justice - that has essentially already bankrupted the housing sector.
These people are dangerous. You can ignore economics for a certain amount of time if you have deep pockets, but at some point or another, the markets will toss you out on your ear after taking all of your money. The only thing that happens when you force the banks to behave as if finances and economics didn't matter is that the banks fail.
I mean, how stupid can you be? If this is the calibre of lawyers that are running the country...ye gods. One of the best arguments ever for passing a constitutional amendment forbidding lawyers from holding public office (it's actually not such a bad idea, as conflict of interests are rife: lawyers-turned-politicians get laws passed that profit politicians-turned lawyers...).
The second link underscores how fundamentally clueless Democrats are. Seriously clueless, clueless in the sense that they apparently can't think things through to their logical conclusions (or, probably more accurately, they have been thinking things through, to the logical conclusion that they can create opportunities for crony capitalism and corruption).
Here the recommendation is for the resurrection of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac model for infrastructure investments, because those institutions worked out so well (actually they did for the Democrats, enriching the party faithful, including Barney Frank's boyfriend, while committing fraud upon the US taxpayers):
The new bank would be a government-sponsored enterprise, or GSE, whether or not anyone admits it. The bank would have an implicit subsidy for its debt because it is backed by the government. And the debt it issued would be "off-budget," which means it wouldn't show up in annual outlays. When she first proposed the concept in 2008, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro explicitly described the bank as a "public private partnership like Fannie Mae."
Such an outfit will inevitably be politicized, as similar examples have been all over the world. Japan's postal bank has been used for decades to finance public works. Japan's roads and bridges are grand but its economy has grown little in 20 years. Agribanks, regional development banks, Brazil's BNDES national bank have all become vehicles for the political allocation of credit.
Ms. DeLauro's bill admits as much, stating that the bank must take into account the "economic, environmental, social benefits and costs" of the projects seeking financial assistance. Among the considerations: responsible employment practices, use of renewable energy, reduction in carbon emissions, poverty and inequality reduction, training for low-income workers and public health benefits.
Right, Like that's going to work.
The inability to learn from past mistakes is a sign of deteriorating mental ability. Of course, that is assuming that both of these approaches is not the deliberate attempt to create institutions capable of committing, for political and personal gain, immense damages to the US economy.
Aren't we screwed enough already? I cannot, seriously, fathom why anyone can trust the Democratic Party, at this point in time, to behave like responsible adults. This is the party of the crony deals completed in back rooms, backed up with extortionate demands from "public prosecutors" whose sole job is to make it impossible for anyone to escape the fleecing.
This is not the America I grew up in. It is not the America that is the shining city on the hill. This is the America of race politics, of the Chicago machine, of deep corruption and vampire policies that aim only to bleed the productive dry while laughing their way to the bank. Like all corrupt societies, it is dysfunctional and can only end up in one way: chaos and collapse. It's just a question of time...
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen