Wanted: A Suck It Up candidate
Update: Reader T.W. e-mails: “I wanted to commend you for your piece concerning the mortgage mess and the politicians who are offering handouts for people who made poor decisions. I live in the metro Northern VA area and purchased a home in mid-2006, just as the housing market was beginning to turn south. I have witnessed firsthand the wild speculation and building explosion that led to the drop in prices and the loss of equity. I attempted to warn friends that home prices were artificially high and that the market would be unable to sustain such levels.In response I was encouraged to go with an interest only loan by friends who claimed to be in the know. I took seriously the terms of my loan and made sure to keep myself within my financial limits. Limits that took into account not only the rates when I signed for my loan, but also taking into account what the rates might be in several years. I am not a financial wizard. I was History major in college and an enlisted Marine; I have an allergic reaction to numbers and percentages. If I could figure it out anyone can. Like you I am waiting for the other shoe to drop; and land smack on top of those of us, responsible citizens, who didn’t make uninformed decisions and think it was a good idea to take out a huge home loan when we did not have the income to match. Like you I am also waiting, most likely in vain, for politicians to reinsert a term in our national discourse that has long been out of style: responsibility.”
Update: Reader J.L. e-mails: “I read your column often and today you nailed the problem in the mortgage industry. I am a loan originator in Upstate NY and am increasingly frustrated with the lack of understanding of what has happened in the mortgage industry. For sure, there are many loan brokers and bankers who carry a share of the blame, but the biggest problem are the people who wanted to purchase a home that they really couldn’t afford and relied on creative financing. If you could see the endless amount of disclosures and paperwork that a borrower is required to sign and both the mortgage application process and at closing, it is laughable to think that, as Senator Obama suggests, these people had no understanding of what they were entering into.”
Update: Jesse Jackson continues to milk the subprime cow.
***
I need a man. A man who can say “No.” A man who rejects Big Nanny government. A man who thinks being president doesn’t mean playing Santa Claus. A man who won’t panic in the face of economic pain. A man who won’t succumb to media-driven sob stories.
A man who can look voters, the media, and the Chicken Littles in Congress in the eye and say the three words no one wants to hear in Washington: Suck. It. Up.
The Michigan primary put economics at the top of the political radar screen, and the Democrat presidential candidates have been doling out spending proposals, stimulus packages, housing market rescues, and other election-year-goodie pledges like Pez candy dispensers gone haywire. Which leading GOP candidate represents fiscal accountability and limited government? Who will take the side of responsible homeowners and responsible borrowers livid at bipartisan bailout plans for a minority of Americans who bought more house than they should have and took out unwise mortgages they knew they couldn’t repay?
I don’t want to hear Republicans recycling the Blame Predatory Lenders rhetoric of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Jesse Jackson. Enough with the victim card. Borrowers are not all saints. There’s nothing compassionate about taking money from prudent, frugal families and using it to aid their reckless neighbors and co-workers who moved into McMansions they couldn’t afford or went crazy tapping their home equity and now find themselves underwater.
Economist Tyler Cowen points out the problem of predatory borrowing — something you never hear politicians spotlight. He notes, “As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications,” according to research on more than three million loans done by BasePoint Analytics. “Many of the frauds were simple rather than ingenious. In some cases, borrowers who were asked to state their incomes just lied, sometimes reporting five times actual income; other borrowers falsified income documents by using computers. Too often, mortgage originators and middlemen looked the other way rather than slowing down the process or insisting on adequate documentation of income and assets. As long as housing prices kept rising, it didn’t seem to matter.”
Message to Washington: Stop treating every defaulting borrower like Mother Teresa.
At last week’s FoxNews debate, the He-Men of the GOP field went all mealy-mouthed when asked about the signs of recession. Mitt Romney asserted our need to “stop the housing crisis.” Does he mean the government should insulate borrowers and lenders from culpability? Continue to artificially prop up housing prices? If so, why? If not, then what?
Last month, Mike Huckabee told an NPR reporter unequivocally that it “is not the purpose of government to prop people up from every poor decision they make.” Amen, Reverend Huckabee. But at the New Hampshire debate, he sheepishly avoided tough pronouncements and instead voiced support for President Bush’s Hillarycare-Lite housing bailout since it “didn’t involve tax dollars.” Yet.
Huckabee is comforting himself and his followers with semantic self-delusion. The Bush measures — including a subprime interest-rate freeze, a proposed expansion of the freeze to cover prime-rate borrowers, and a push to increase the availability of so-called jumbo mortgages and to lift the $417,000 loan cap — are the camel’s nose under the tent. Eventually, responsible taxpayers will pay.
As for “Straight Talk” Senator John McCain, he immediately pitched federal education and job-training programs for laid-off workers. “We need to go to the community colleges and design education and training programs so that these workers get a second chance. That’s our obligation as a nation.” It is? This is conservative? This is the alternative to Clintoncare? No, this is Clintoncare. Why can’t Americans be expected to pay for their own schooling and retraining?
Fred Thompson, supposedly the conservative’s conservative, asserted the need for a fiscal stimulus: “I think that has to be considered somewhere along the line if the economy calls for it.”
McCain and Romney want expansion of the Federal Housing Administration to allow borrowers to refinance — on the backs of taxpayers. Rudy Giuliani wants government aid for borrowers who were “cheated.” No word on what he would do to borrowers who did the cheating. (Summary of candidates’ positions on the mortgage bailout here.)
As we head toward Super Tuesday, the subprime mess and the economy will dominate — and the Do Something Democrat candidates will turn their spigot of overextended-homeowner sob stories on full blast. Do Republicans want a clear alternative to liberal-nomics? Or will you settle for a lip-service conservative who will reward fiscal recklessness with only slightly less government intervention than the Dems?
I’m still looking for Mr. Right. Remember: You’ll have me at “Suck. It. Up.”
***
A reader reminds me of the famous floor speech of Col. David Crockett, who served as a US congressman from Tennessee, “Not Yours To Give:”
One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:
“Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.
Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”
He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.
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- One of these days the responsible, successful people living within our means will be out of money to give to the rest of the knuckleheads in this country. | Manly's Blog
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Categories: 2008 campaign, Subprime crisis
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Sorry….typing too fast again.
I have no love for W or Billy Jeff, but they are not mentally ill like Paul.
Ron Paul’s idiotic isolationist foreign “policy” would bankrupt this country inside of two years. The 1929 depression would be a piker in comparison.
That is if we aren’t nuked by Russia, China or one of the Islamic states first. You know, because Paul was too busy protecting the “right” to smoke dope to see the threat before it became a reality.
If there is anyone to blame for this “mess” it is the simple minded libertarians who vote for Dems or stay home to teach Republicans a lesson.
Lesson learned: Never trust a libertarian to do anything that is not in THEIR personal interest, even if it damages the rest of the country.
Pelosi and Reid send their regards.
Great article, “Not Yours To Give” by Congressman Davy Crockett….
The part I liked best; “Money(taxes) with them(congress)is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.”
One of the best lines of the day…..
Ordinary Coloradan #97, re: Ron Paulbots and terrorism…..”They don’t realize hunting wolves is more then waiting until they are at your door.”
Barry, what I am saying is she is spinning and wrong on Fred – and what’s worse, her spin, once examined, is basically immaterial, wrong and is singleminded bias at best, lies at worst. The MSM does that often enough to conservative candiates; we don’t need an online conservative like MM spreading negative spin to tear down the few conservative candidates we have left. What ever happened to Reagan’s 11th?
I’d have no issues if MM based her attacks in facts and rationality, but her negativity on FT is as irrational as it is incessant, and as I show, its usually incorrect and unfounded. And I am coming to a regrettable conclusion, that when it comes to Fred Thompson, MM is extremely untrustworthy, and she is somehow blind to being objective and she will, perhaps inadvertently, frequently write things that are not true. As I point out, she has still not corrected her biased remarks in many places, nor has she appologized and retracted the Politico hit piece she so approvingly furthered by having it run here and on HA. Its a fundamental issue of being accountable for your words, and MM has, disappointly, not stepped up the way an honest conservative person would. That is why I call her into question here, giving her the benefit of a doubt that she may be so close to her bias that she is unaware of it. Or better, get her to publicly admit her bias and perhaps get the reason for it – I admire Michelle and she has a good reason for dislking Fred, that would carry weight with me, and I want to know what it would be. However, if shes this off balance regarding a candidate, will she go off balance on other things? One wonders.
If MM is genuinely interested in the truth, she’d apologize for the UNFOUNDED negative comments, and for publishing politico hit pieces, etc.
But she hasn’t. That means we end up abandoning issues based politics in favor of the politics of personal destruction. MM with her bias is doing more damage to the conservatives than to hollow RINO “image” guys like Hucakbee and McCain. They run on spin and swim in it. Her hatchet job on fellow conservatives is wrong, and in the end only helps the non-conservatives.
As for the “suck it up”, here is a quote from a campaign stop in SC the other day that illustrates Thompson’s candor:
Now WHY does Michelle not see that as the sort of response we need?
Its obvious that is the sort of answer she is looking for, if she’d only open her eyes and abandon whatever prejudice she is carrying against Thompson.
We can vote any “suck it up” candidate into the Presidency we want, but he won’t be worth a darn with a Pelosi/Reid Congress. As long as the liberals control Congress, they will pass and spend anything they want, overriding anything a President wants. Not only do we need a conservative President, but we have to get the liberals out of Congress. Only Congress can make laws and spend money. Presidents can only suggest, and, with help, veto.
On January 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm, graysonret said:
We can vote any “suck it up” candidate into the Presidency we want, but he won’t be worth a darn with a Pelosi/Reid Congress. As long as the liberals control Congress, they will pass and spend anything they want, overriding anything a President wants. Not only do we need a conservative President, but we have to get the liberals out of Congress. Only Congress can make laws and spend money. Presidents can only suggest, and, with help, veto
To further your point graysonret,#104 We can ill afford a liberal rubber stamp in the White House. I like Fred but, I have asked this question before and I don’t get much of an answer. What state north of the Mason/Dixon line could Fred win as the candidate for the Presidency?
Ordinary Coloradan, I don’t dispute you much on Fred’s conservatism. I’m just not seeing much about any candidate this year that I like and can find something negative, at least in my view, to say about them all, including Fred.
Maybe it’s just me but I haven’t noticed Michelle writing anything more negative about him than the other candidates in the race this year.
Now, Michelle does have a core set of issues that appear very important to her, including illegal immigration, a prevailing topic on her blog, as well as some other issues.
She comments based on issues she holds important. But, in all fairness, she does allow supporters of Thompson, Giuliani, Huckabee, Romney, Hunter and, even, Paul to post to her comments section. Were she to have a bias against a certain candidate(s), I suspect she would limit or end that. But, she hasn’t.
As for me, I am still waiting to see for whom I will end up voting on Super Tuesday. I was leaning hard toward Fred, when he was “testing the waters” in his non-campaign campaign. But, after laboring with the wait for him to officially announce, coupled with the inclusion of the likes of Spencer Abraham in his campaign, he has started to fall far out of favor for my vote.
We have already had one President who went around saying “Suck it up,” and now we may have his wife as our next President. Maybe we can say the same thing in a different way.
Well, at least they might be able to say “Suck it up!” with a different connotation than he did, cloncon.
I beg to differ there are plenty of people out there that are electable their just not millionaire suck up’s to the washington elite and special interest group’s. They exist in the citezenship of this great nation the middle class. The guy that has had to scrimp and save and work’s hard for a living and really does know your pain.
Let me tell you if I were President (My wife say’s, now that’s a scarey thought)
any and I mean any bill that came to my desk with even the smallest of pork attached would be vetoed. I would tell congress if you want money for your district then put it in a bill by itself and my advisor’s and I will research it and I will decide wether or not to sign it. The IRS would either be abolished or drastically revamped. The border’s would be closed yesterday. NO bail out’s if you can’t be fiscaly reasponsible you don’t deserve to be bailed out. I would appeal to the American people to demand that Congress take a pay cut and the Presiden’t salary as well. The lobbyist’s and special interest would be thrown out of Washington and if nothing got done then so be it, it would’nt be my fault and I would let the American people know it. I could go on but it would take several pages and I’ll spare you the rest of my rant.
Sincerely, Blind Mule
I have been saying it for a while. All of this bailout nonsense is ultimately counter productive. The folks that pols are trying to save can’t be saved because they are in over their heads.
For this reason, there is little the government can do, and I have said as much
I agree about Thompson’s error in grabbing Spencer Abraham. I still wonder about that (but I notice that Abraham seems to have faded away).
No candidate this time is without flaws. But what worries me the most is that an underhanded JimmyCarter/BillClinton guy like Huckabee might be our candidate, or almost as bad, McCain who STILL doesn’t “get it” about illegals and the border as a matter of soverignty and security (respectively), free speech and smaller government (not to mention his falling for the anthropogenic greenhouse hoax).
What I want in a president:
Appoint proper Supremne Court Justices who will limit government powers rather than expanding them (i.e. reverse Rowe and send it back to the states, kill Kelo, etc).
agressively win the war on Islamo-fascism (includes the border, and standing firm in Iraq, and strong armed services)
build the d**n fence
attrit illegals through enforcement
reduce the size of government
drill for oil wherever we need and build nukes to get us out of the petroleum economy
reform social securitiy and Bush’s medicare time bomb.
Other than that, keep the veto pen handy, and veto anything with earmarks (which means veto everything Congress tries to pass – makem do the work)
Nobody out there fits that bill perfectly, but Fred is closest, and Romney is next. The rest dont even dare
The only “person” that can fix our country is GOD.
I believe that he too is fed up with all the liars and deceivers.
We’d better start praying for help asap or I believe we will feel His wrath very soon. In fact, I already feel it.
Don’t look for the horsemen just yet, gayle.
Registered voters just need to remove their heads from their posteriors and get some sense about them. Too many folks go with the warm fuzzies a politician gives them and votes from that, instead of a reasoned perspective.
Maybe that is my problem – I just haven’t gotten any warm fuzzies from any of the politicians this time around.
Do you want a candidate who won’t pander, then Duncan Hunter is your man. In Iowa, he refused to push Ethanol, when even the so-called anti-pork McCain said he was in favor of it. He exposed the whole Dubai Port deal, when even the White House was in favor of it. He opposed amnesty for Illegal Immigrants in 1986, against his own party and his own president. He did this because he was and is guided by principle, not by polls, not by pandering. What you see with Duncan Hunter is what you will get.
Barry, the horsemen are the illegals I do believe.
Gayle for Prez; BarryF for Veep.
I’ll order the bumper stickers today!
The Wash Times had a good series a few weeks back explaining sub-prime mortgages. They are sub prime for a reason… the borrowers did not have good enough credit ratings to get prime loan rates, so they were offered options and some of these options are financial suicide.
The Times article held a lot of groups responsible for the debacle including real estate agents and appraisers reporting inflated values, real estate agents acting as lenders (ethical?), lack of policing in the real estate and loan industries, niave and/or greedy buyers, a push to increase homeownership by the government, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Bad things happen to good people and not everyone upside down right now was a niave idiot. Some people had tragedies in their lives.
The rules for loans need to be tightened… liars loans? How many loans were made without legit documentation? The borrowers knew when they were submitting incomplete forms. The lenders knew when they were submitting incomplete paperwork and the real estate agents know when someone will be hurt.
This government bailout is not for the people. It’s for the banks and lenders losing money on foreclosures. In a free market the banks would come up with solutions… after all they don’t want to get stuck with empty houses… and some banks are already working with people to keep them in their houses.
I have no sympathy for the greedy people, living far above their means. They are a bit like the grasshopper in the grasshopper and the ant story. It does not take much to run the numbers and look at the bottom line.
A bailout is going to happen because politicians want to get elected and don’t really care about the voters’s pocketbooks. We just need to continue to make a fuss about all of this and talk about the bailout will hurt us and the rest of the people following the rules.
I’d like to think that as conservatives, the difference between us and the libs is that we use the brains God gave us before we react. So before we demonize people that invested/speculated in the housing markets (burn the witches, so to speak) it would be nice to understand the real problem, (which is big enough) which is being exacerbated because nobody on capitol hill understands the problem – let alone the MSM – (and few on Wall St). Problem is that the financial structures used in modern finance (CDO’s and derivatives) are untested and unknown in down markets (except for computer modeling – which is “junk in, junk out” sort of like global warming theories). So these new types of untested, complex financial structures were improperly used/ misunderstood by the vast majority of the investment bankers, regulators, rating agencies and regular bankers because they all saw short term profits without fully understanding what they were doing (which is stupidity). Derivatives are contracts between buyers of protection and sellers of protection for bonds. Derivatives are not like mortgages. Mortgages have real estate as collateral and derivatives only have the parties to the contract and their ability to pay what they are contracting to pay and are not related to the mortgages or car loans. The contracts have things called “events of default” which can range from an actual default by some or all of the underlying mortgages to events such as having to mark-to-market (required by accounting rules – GAP) based on an increase in the federal funds rate, or some other unrelated event. In addition, the potential losses can be greater than the value of the reference asset (the block of mortgages). In other words, somebody creates a series of bonds from the mortgages on real estate, (or car loans, or credit card receivables- called “CDO’s) and slices those cashflows into different series of bonds (called tranches), then somebody creates a synthetic bond/derivative from the original, takes some of the different tranches and mixes them with tranches from an unrelated bond offering and resells, ad infinitum. In fact, from $10,000,000 in mortgages/CDO’s, you could conceivably create $100,000,000 worth of derivatives contracts. So when
an event of default took place, even if all the mortgages were current, the buyer of protection would say to the seller of protection, “pay me”. If the amount of the contract (which could be greater then the reference assets) was large enough, it would impact the rating of the seller and set off a chain reaction that could trigger other defaults in other unrelated issues. If somebody couldn’t pay, then everybody hires attorneys to find the assets that back the derivative (which would be a $400 per hour and take a good long while). In addition, you could have the top 5% or 10% of the $1 billion dollar mortgage portfolio default yet the whole thing would come unglued. Big mess. Takes time to figure it out. Nobody ism going to invest in CDO’s until they figure out if they are even still inbusiness. NO investors buying mortgage paper, the mortgage companies all start folding within days. If they can’t sell mortgages, they can’t pay for their operations. Now, does this mean that all the house buyers are to blame? NO! Does it mean the guys at the banks and investment banks lost their jobs? Yup. Does it mean the financial markets are in turmoil? Yup. Does it mean we should bail out anybody? Only if they are related to me……..
hope this muddies the waters thoroughly…
Bullseye!
It’s not to defend the idiots that borrowed above their means or bought more house than they could afford. But if they were the only ones getting hurt, this issue would be less prominent on the radar screen right now. It’s those left holding the bag on lousy mortgages, especially securitized ones, that are pushing hard for this bailout, i.e. the people that love capitalism when they are making money, but go running off to the Feds for help when they start losing it due to bad investments.
What does it tell you when Henry Paulson’s former firm, Goldman Sachs, was selling mortgage-backed securities to clients and then turning around and shorting the very same securities?
why should the government do anything here? I don’t get it. Oh wait, a bunch of collectivists are in power and refuse to stand at the principles of their party, no nation-building, friendly relations, and most of all, SMALL GOVERNMENT
Ordinary Coloradan:
As someone who used to live in Colorado (Colorado Springs to be exact), I agree with all of your conservative principles. However, this military wife says to you: LAY OFF MICHELLE. How has she ever attacked Thompson? She’s been pointing out all the candidate’s flaws and thank God. She’s doing the work the MSM don’t have the sincerity to.
As for Thompson: I really don’t like him. I find him to be glib and flippant and so do many people. He hemmed and hawed about when he would declare his candidacy and it just got old really fast. He’s in love with himself and the sound of his voice. Yes, now he’s starting to catch on but what about a couple months ago when it could have really mattered?
I’ll be honest and say I’m a Rudy fan. I’m originally from New York State and he did things for NYC that no other mayor could or would. At least Rudy is honest about what he believes (even if some of his personal choices suck). All of these people (on both sides and except perhaps Hunter) are deeply flawed.
Michelle has been doing the hard work the MSM is too lazy to. She has gained my respect and I really resent people who want to say she’s attacking when she’s really critiquing Thompson. So much for civil discourse. Have we learned nothing from Democrats over the years?
Send my regards to Governor Ritter…
Coloradans deserve the fiscal pain and heartburn they’ll receive from this phony Dem.
Two things about the email above:
This requires help from the greedy mortgage companies. period.
and this
You’re correct, provided the people speak English, which brings up many more possibilities for fraud.
I believe Fred is that man.
Hey, go wake him up.
According to Ann Coulter’s current column, Romney (I’m paraphrasing, of course) is probably the best the Republicans can do so we have best deal with it. Not the most unrestrained endorsement, to be sure, but I love and respect Ann. Even when I disagree with her, even when I wince at times from what/how she makes a point . . .
If only Romney could give us something to work with, I could overlook the rest, and there is a lot to overlook. Some kind of bold departure from Bush I, II that would show the world we grasp the terrible situation we as a nation are in and are prepared, after 20 years of non-stop nonsense, to come to grips with it, domestically and internationally.
Republicans have nothing to lose. Why not return to fundamental principles for a change (so to speak)?
JJ and Al are racist. Think, make your decision and live with it. “Suck it up”
Maybe we should all try to get along. Maybe it is time for a black President. Fictional Pres. Palmer did ok on 24 and after his assassination, his well-qualified brother was then Pres. So if we reach across the aisle and place our trust in Barack Hussein Obama, we will at least have hope as a nation and eschew our imperialistic war-mongering ways. Isn’t this better than electing the media’s and liberal choices for Republican nominees in either McCain or Huckleberry? Huckleberry wants to change the constitution to reflect what god told him was wise. Obama may follow a firebrand hate-whitey preacher back in Chicago, but he’s his own man. So what if he was put in place initially by a corrupt chicago machine or managed to force his opponent for US Senate from the race by underhanded machinations? Doesn’t the ends justify the means? Imagine racial harmony and the great liberal big government in our lifetimes. Fatboy Teddy Kennedy would be proud and, hopefully, satisfied at last. Everybody will be equal except for those who are more equal. Radical Islam will see our sincerity and relate well to a wunderkind President with an early Muslim background. Do you want eight more years of the Clinton duplicity or prefer giving a new set of power hungry crooks a chance? Vote for hope and change. Don’t you feel all arm and fuzzy inside casting off your inherent racial bias? The UN and Euroweenies will be so proud that we’ve seen the light. Reject those evil neocons at last. And maybe the Silk Pony can help heal the schism of two Americas as the Veep.
If anybody would care to notice, the Fed has already lowered the prime rate and promises to again.
Doesn’t that mean mortgage rates will reset lower?
If the market is allowed to work won’t the lending industry and the economy come into balance on its own?
If the Government does a bailout, why should the market even try to respond and why shouldn’t the lending industry and borrowers just keep on being way to creative?
I could have bought a house but, after weighing my financial situation, I realized I couldn’t afford it at the moment. I made a good decision. So why should I have my tax dollars seized from me to give to people who made a poor decision, just to allow them to stay in a house we all know they can’t afford?
Why should my good decision be punished, and those who made poor decision be rewarded with my money, and from others like me?
It’s insanity.