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 crisifying
- COVID Lessons: Journalistic Delusions and the Madness of Politicians
- COVID-19 was real. The crisis surrounding it was entirely manufactured. Everything we did took a manageable disease and turned it into a killer. And the very worst was believing a media we knew was lying.
- COVID Lessons: Don’t trust socialists
- Our response made the virus worse. We trusted self-styled experts, failed models, socialists, and the media over what we could see with our own eyes.
- Deadly Perfection
- Whenever the left wants to devalue someone’s life, they call it economics.
- 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.
- Three more pages with the topic crisifying, and other related pages
More financial reform
- Definitionally dodging recession responsibility
- You’re in a recession when the economy’s doing well; you’re out of it when the economy sucks. Ignore that mortgage crisis behind the curtain.
- 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.
- Moving on to John McCain
- The more I learn about John McCain the more I want to vote for him.
More presidential elections
- Nothing to fear but a brokered convention
- The reason someone smart would want a brokered convention is that it’s exciting, and it means media coverage, and even more, it means unfiltered media coverage.
- If I were running for president…
- I’d make heavy use of short videos, and I’d record everything I did with the media.
- 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.
- 21 more pages with the topic presidential elections, and other related pages
More Sarah Palin
- Sarah
- Published while Governor Sarah Palin was just Governor Sarah Palin and not the 2008 Vice Presidential nominee for the Republican Party, this is a fascinating look at the pre-media frenzy governor.
- The anti-politician
- In 2007, then-governor Sarah Palin turned down federal funds for a pointless Alaskan roads project in hopes that the money could be put to better use by another state, Minnesota, that had just seen a tragic bridge collapse during rush hour.
- Nothing to fear but a brokered convention
- The reason someone smart would want a brokered convention is that it’s exciting, and it means media coverage, and even more, it means unfiltered media coverage.
- President Obama pokes the bear
- Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you. Why is President Obama running against his 2008 opponent’s vice-presidential candidate? Why is he lying about her? And why doesn’t he want to discuss real issues?
- Who is the fiscally-sane candidate?
- Which of the Republican candidates is most likely to help turn this country back on the path of fiscal sanity?
- 19 more pages with the topic Sarah Palin, and other related pages
Updated to include the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.