Blaming the financial crisis on the reformers
On Saturday, September 6, Sarah Palin warned us that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had become “too big and too expensive to the taxpayers”. The Democratic blogs and newspapers went into full frenzy: “Gaffe!” cried the Huffington Post. “Palin gloriously, fabulously unfit for duty” said McClatchey Newspapers a few days ago. Fannie and Freddie are private companies! They don’t cost the taxpayers anything!
But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t private companies. They’re “government-sponsored enterprises” whose mistakes cost the taxpayers money. On Monday morning some of those headlines remained visible, but few new ones appeared: the news had hit that the taxpayers were going to have to pay hundreds of billions for Fannie and Freddie. Palin was right. Nor was this a surprise: the blank check had already been authorized by congress over the summer.
Now the Obama campaign is blaming President Bush for the lack of oversight, and trying to smear McCain with that blame. But it’s not surprising that McCain’s vice presidential candidate would be calling for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac reform: thirteen years ago, McCain tried to privatize the FMs before they became a crisis. Democrats blocked it. And it isn’t even fair to blame Bush: five years ago Bush tried to create an oversight agency for the FMs, and Democrats blocked that, too. Two years ago, McCain tried once again to reform them; it never made it out of committee.
Maybe it’s time we started paying attention to their warnings on social security, before that becomes a crisis?
- Whose policies led to the credit crisis?
- “What many do not recall is that Bush wanted to tighten oversight with a new regulatory board for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government recipients for the express purpose of addressing bad loan practices—and Democrats blocked it.”
- The Palin “gaffe”: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailouts “expensive”
- “First, they operate as private companies, but they’re not. Both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have government backing for their operations—which puts taxpayers in the position of co-signer. John McCain made this point two months ago when responding to the initial crisis that threatened to bankrupt the two lending giants, and said the time has come to eliminate both and allow the private sector to do their work, instead of these two quasi-governmental agencies”
- McCain’s attempt to fix Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in 2005
- “In this [2006] speech, McCain managed to predict the entire collapse that has forced the government to eat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Bear Stearns and AIG.”
- Obama Needs a Sister Soulja Moment
- “Congressional Democrats were and remain the leading defenders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, promising to resist efforts to shrink the companies, now under government control, and sell off their assets. Democrats had plenty of help from Republicans, to be sure, but it was mainly conservatives who have been warning for more than a decade that their public risk/private profit model was a disaster waiting to happen.”
- Palin Makes Her First Gaffe
- It seems to me that the “gaffe” was made by bloggers who somehow thought that hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money isn’t expensive.
- Mary Sanchez: Palin gloriously, fabulously unfit for duty
- Taxpayers on the hook for a couple hundred billion “might” count as taxpayers taking a hit for these companies; and it’s all the fault of the GOP for, apparently, not fighting the Democratic party hard enough.
- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: too big and too expensive
- “Not surprisingly, Palin was roundly attacked by people either too partisan to be honest about things or too ignorant that Congress had already written a blank check to Fannie and Freddie that was getting more expensive to taxpayers by the day.”
More presidential elections
- Fighting for the American Dream
- Joe the Plumber writes about his experiences at the center of one of the most vicious smear campaigns in recent memory.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- Vote on performance, not promises
- If you’re disappointed that President Obama is the same wheeler-dealer he was when he was a Senator, take it as a lesson for future elections: vote performance and record, not promises.
- A proven reformer
- If one thing exemplifies the difference between the two main campaigns, it’s their encouragement of anonymous donors.
- Obama campaign skirts campaign finance law
- I expected the New York Times to be silent on the illegal donations that the Obama 2008 campaign encourages. I should have known better: they’re trying to cover for the campaign. But the bigger issue is that laws that don’t get enforced are counterproductive; they encourage dishonesty and lawlessness.
- 19 more pages with the topic presidential elections, and other related pages
More Crisifying
- Can the president take responsibility for market rises?
- If the president gets blamed when the market falls, can he take credit when it rises?
- Crisis quote of the day
- Congress: if you aren’t willing to go broke, we’ll go broke for you.
- What does 1.2 trillion dollars buy?
- What can you get for 1.2 trillion nowadays? How about two and a half years of no employer-side payroll taxes?
- My Pet Crisis
- Someone needs to send President Obama a copy of The Pet Goat. Panic is not the right response to a financial crisis.
- Upturns with no downturns
- A pessimistic clock might be right twice a day; it might not be. It’s hard to tell when the clock doesn’t even use the same numbers we’re used to.
More Sarah Palin
- Voting for Nobody in New York
- The Republican Party and Doug Hoffman is providing social conservatives with the perfect opportunity to vote for Nobody in New York’s 23rd district.
- It is widely believed that the news media is clueless
- I believe that the news media is clueless over the sales records of Sarah Palin’s bestseller “Going Rogue”. Because they’re clueless, they’re flailing about madly for a narrative that fits the book into their uninspired, factless world view.
- Truly principled politicians don’t split the baby
- Too often in politics, we pretend that the principled act is to cut the baby in half. Governor Sarah Palin refuses that compromise. Her ambitions for success were for the success of reform in Alaska. She did what she needed to do to ensure that those reforms survive.
- This wasteful political bloodsport
- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin resigns—to save Alaskans money, and to save her family from the savage liberal arena. And, most likely, to avoid a lame-duck governorship. Resigning now is clearly the right thing to do if she’s going to run for president; all the more so because even though it’s the right thing to do it also reduces her chances.
- Resistance to media bias is unexpected
- It’s amazing how unprepared the biased media is when people don’t play along with their bias.
- One more page with the topic Sarah Palin, and other related pages
Updated to include the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.