Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 12:48:03 PM
The super bloated housing bill was signed by President Bush yesterday. He signed the bill in secret. That tells me that he really did not like the bill. If he likes a bill and thinks that it is a good idea, he will sign it in public with a ceremony. If he thinks that the bill is not a good idea, but will sign it anyway, he signs it in secret.
This housing bill will do nothing for me as a homeowner. It will not make any money easier for me to get as I already have a loan and am happily paying it off. Even if it did something for me, I would still think that the bill was a bad idea. It is a bad idea because it transfers the risk to the future. That means that my children and grandchildren will have to pay for the short term relief that this bill will give to the housing market. And the relief will only be felt at the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac level anyway. The individual homeowner will not really see any difference in how things are done.
The news media is saying that the bill loosens restrictions on FHA loans. That remains to be seen. It most likely will allow more people that cannot pay loans back to get loans. That will just aggravate the problem in the long-term. In case you cannot tell, I do not have much faith in this bloated bill.
The worst thing the bill does is inject the government into the housing market more than it has been in the past. I cannot find anywhere in the Constitution where it says that the federal government should be involved in housing markets. Of course, I also cannot find where the federal government should be involved in most of what the federal government is involved with. I have a copy of the Constitution on every classroom wall in the building I work in. The Constitution also includes all of the amendments that have been approved. Even looking through the amendments, I cannot find any reference to housing assistance. It must have been an oversight by the founders. They saw everything else needed for our country, they must have missed housing assistance.
Every Senator and Representative that voted for this bill should be voted out of office when they come up for re-election. That means all the Representatives in 2008 and 1/3 of the Senators each year for the next 6 years. We will most likely forget about this bill by the time November rolls around, but we should not forget. It is one of those events that should be remembered for all time as a stupid event and the people that pushed it should be reviled as doing something stupid.
It is easy to sell the bill as for the “poor”. Selling it as for the “poor” and it being an election year make it something that no elected Representative can ignore. They have to do “something”. The problem occurred because of actions by the federal government being involved in the housing market. The elected representatives are trying to solve the problem of the federal government being involved in the housing markets by involving the federal government even more in the housing markets. Tell me if I am wrong, but there is something wrong with that statement. You do not solve a problem of too much government by getting the government more involved. You solve the problem of too much government by removing at least some of the government from the problem. That would solve the problem, but no elected Representative will vote to lose power. They will only vote to gain power, unless the public demands that they vote to lose power. Then they will be forced to vote to lose power, kicking and screaming all the way that it is the wrong thing to do.
We need elected Representatives who are in the mold of Adams, Jefferson, Washington and the entire founding fathers. Unfortunately, we have weasels that are only on the lookout for themselves, not the country. This bill is a perfect example of how weasels react when they see the problem of too much government. They say there is too much government, the solution is more government. Too many people do not see that the problem is too much government. They are not told that the problem was caused by government. That way when government is proposed as the solution, the elected Representatives can get away with not telling the truth to the public.