The Urban Grind

My friend Joe is an American living in New Zealand. He has blogged about what nationalized healthcare is really like, despite what Obama and the MSM would have Americans believe.

Let’s break it down into language we can all understand. As many of you know, I am an American living and working in the socialist haven of New Zealand, and I have some personal and vicarious experience in the system that is in place here. The model is the same, with a few differences, in just about every other socialized Western Democracy.

Here is an all too common scenario faced by patients in socialized health care systems such as what we have in New Zealand.

You plan ahead and go to your GP (general practitioner/family doctor) for a regular physical or check-up. By the way, only surgeries, hospital and emergency care are “free”; you pay out of pocket $40-$50 to see your GP, plus whatever blood work or prescriptions you need. Only infants get free GP coverage. Now, let’s say the doctor finds something wrong, and he/she refers you to a specialist for further evaluation.

Here’s where the fun starts.

You call to set-up that appointment and get put on a waiting list, and that can be as little as a couple of days to as long as 8 or 9 months – or longer. There is no negotiating or haggling on that. It’s done based on category of severity which is assessed by the district health board, and YOU have NO SAY in that matter – you are what they tell you you are, and that’s that. You finally get to see the specialist, and if further treatment is needed, you get put on a priority list which is, again, assessed by the district health board.

Now the REAL fun starts.

When it comes down to it, the older you are (once you’re over 50 or 60), the further to the back of the line you go. There are only so many resources available (it’s called rationing in any other universe), and the bureaucrats at the district medical boards decide who will get what first based on what value you have to the system. In other words, if two people need, let’s say, a hip replacement, heart surgery, cancer treatment – whatever – and one of them is 20 and the other is 65, the 20 year old will most likely get it before the 65 year old will. Why? Because as a 65 year old, you’re already retired, collecting your retirement, and basically, your days are numbered as a contributing tax payer – the state isn’t going to get any more production out of you. The 20 year old, well, the state looks at him or her as a cash cow with a whole life ahead of them that the state can milk for taxes to pay for all the other shit the state pays for.

Now, you can jump up and down, write letters, protest all you want, but it won’t likely get you anywhere. Here in New Zealand you can’t sue. There is only so much money to go around when the tax base is so limited in a small country like NZ, and there are so many government entitlement programs competing for funding. Doctors and nurses and every other state-funded health care provider are on a fixed salary, and to top that off, they all have unions, so it seems almost every other week one group or another is going on strike.

But do you know what the real problem is? The bureaucracy. Inevitably what happens is that any time there is an increase in funding or expanding care in the form of treatment and/or facilities, who gets a big portion of that funding? The bureaucrats – mid level administrators to oversee the programs, commission feasibility studies to determine cost effectiveness, and all the other bullshit. In other words, people with job titles and no real job get their money first, leaving little left over for the front-line healthcare providers, the facilities, the pharmaceuticals, etc., where the money SHOULD be going. Regarding prescribed drugs, the state has a list of approved drugs and providers, and you have little or no say in that matter either.

As a result, we are facing a constant shortage of quality people to work in this country’s health care system because so many New Zealand-educated doctors and nurses leave here for greener pastures overseas in places like Australia (which has socialized health care but can pay a better wage and is close to NZ), Canada, the UK (not much better than NZ) – but guess where a lot of New Zealand’s best medical professionals end-up: The US of A. So we have a lot of doctors from India and other parts of Asia and other parts of the world, many of whom, despite having to qualify by New Zealand standards, have questionable qualifications and slip through the cracks. The big saving grace are the professionals (and not just in medicine) who come from South Africa – and they aren’t the ones who are of the same skin hue of Nelson Mandella, if you know what I mean. I’ll say it right here: Thank God for the white South Africans or Afrikaners coming to New Zealand because without them this country would be severely fucked, and as long as things in South Africa remain as fucked-up as they are, the Afrikaners will keep coming here to fill the void left by quality New Zealanders leaving.

If all that sounds good to you, then by all means, support Obamacare, because that is what you’re going to get – or something very close to it.

I completely agree with Joe’s post. What kind of doctor would agree to have the government dictate what salary he or she should receive? (It’s not the government’s business to dictate anyone’s salary, but anyway…) My brother in law’s brother is a top radiologist in Manhattan. This is a man who always got straight A’s. He’s a brilliant, productive genius. Naturally, his pay reflects that. So can you imagine this type of man agreeing to work in a situation where government bureaucrats tell him how much he’s “allowed” to make and how he’s to treat his patients? I certainly can’t. What we’ll get instead are Third World “doctors” with G-d only knows what kind of background.

This is a scenario straight out of Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus “Atlas Shrugged,” where the character of Dr. Hendricks explains to Dagny Taggart why he quit medicine and followed John Galt in his strike. Here’s Dr. Hendrick’s speech:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago, said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I obsedrved that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yeat what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it — and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t. ”

See what Ann Coulter has to say here.

The idiot RINO in question is Rep. Joe Knollenberg from Michigan. Here’s a video of him saying that the money for the bailouts of the auto industry doesn’t belong to taxpayers. Where does he think that money comes from? The tooth fairy? And if this bailout gets approved, all that money will be used for is the worker and retiree benefits, thanks to the unions. Here’s an old post from Barking-Moonbat which shows how the UAW transformed General Motors from a profit making business to a giant welfare tit for its workers and retirees.

# Union retirees from GM get to keep their medical benefits, free of charge, until they die

# GM reported its largest loss in history last quarter .. $1.1 Billion

# The cost of providing this health care to union workers adds $1,100 to $1,500 to the cost of each car.

# GM spends more per car for health care than it does for steel for that car.

# GM spends more per car for health care than it does for advertising for that car.

# The United Auto Workers (UAW) union refuses to budge off of its sweet deal.

I don’t want my tax dollars to prop up a giant welfare operation. Anway, here’s the video:

Via the Powerline Forum

I AM Jane the Plumber

My husband and I don’t make $250K but we hope to someday.

We’ve lived below our means in order to save money beyond the 401Ks we have.

I’ve been going to cooking school in hopes of starting a small food business in the next year or two.

My hopes have been dashed by the prospect of an Obama Presidency.

We’d be risking so much of our money to start the business. Someone forgot to tell Obama that most small businesses fail. To think that if I were actually successful at it (can earn more than $250K) I’d be taxed out of existence, makes the risks way too high to be worth it. Therefore, no new small business for me.

Here’s another one, via The Armchair Energist

I am a high school graduate.

I didn’t have enough money to go to college.

I worked side jobs until I saw a commercial for computer programming school. I applied to go, got a small grant, took out a student loan and went there to learn to program.

I got my first ‘computer’ job at a small company on the second shift and made $2.75 per hour.

I was able to work my way through a few lowly computer jobs until I became a partner of a small computer programming firm.

Three years after I graduated programming school, I started my own programming company.

During the 80’s, I had as many as 50 clients and 4 employees.

Toward the end of the 1980’s, the economic recession took hold and I lost practically everything.

I took a job with a former client. I spent nearly ten years as an employee until I stalled at position #5. I left to pursue other interests.

I was a part-time consultant as I planned to open a food franchise. I secured the exclusive rights for the franchise in New York and New Jersey.

Three years after I left my staff job, I opened a restaurant and added the franchise component. We opened to rave reviews.

After a seventeen year run-up in the restaurant market in New Jersey, the market turned. Business started to fall off and by late 2007, we could no longer sustain the restaurant and sold the business a few months later.

As you know, today, I am a blogger. It was a natural progression of a person who is a mix of entrepreneur, IT professional and political junkie. I am not making a ton of cash, but I see a path and I am following it. I am passionate about what I do and see a way to make some money doing it. I have the support of my family and am in the best of health.

Much like Joe, I am a ‘regular guy’. I wish I was doing better and perhaps, with my drive and dedication, I may improve my lot in life. What I don’t need is to see a country in an economic crisis that if a candidate wins, will cap my success and insert an I.V. as soon as I get back on better footing. When I failed in business, where was MY bailout? I guess I wasn’t “too big to fail.”

I believe that this chaos is the perfect time for an unscrupulous person or person, using the pretense of the government help, to reorganize and socialize government programs. I must caution everyone, income redistribution DOES NOT WORK! It forces everyone to move to the lowest output and maximum gain – it’s a race to the bottom. It kills incentive.

I, like Joe the Plumber, am in a position that I have been before – lower than I want. I DO want to achieve more. I am willing to work for it. I am determined to do it. And I certainly do not want my prize to be that you take away my incentive once I cross the next finish line.

Are YOU Joe the Plumber? I bet many of you are.

Take the shackles off…free your spirit, an fly.

The ‘hope’ I have is that no one wants to control me because HE sees fit to give the spoils of my effort to another.

During last night’s debate, Obama stressed that his tax plan would provide relief to 95% of Americans. But according to the Wall St. Journal, that’s simply not the case.

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:

- A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to “make work pay” that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.

- A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.

- A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).

- A “savings” tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.

- An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.

- A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.

- A “clean car” tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.

Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The total annual expenditures on refundable “tax credits” would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as “tax credits,” the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.

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here’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.

Also, check out Philip Klein’s conversation with Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe about the article linked to above.

James Johnson was the CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. He also served as the head of Barack Obama’s VP search effort until June 2008. Johnson resigned from that position when it was revealed that he received a low cost home load from Countrywide Financial’s CEO.

Anyway, when Johnson was CEO of Fannie Mae, he set up a goal of buying one trillion dollars in low income mortgage loans.

Of course Johnson adamantly opposed any government attempt to monitor Fannie Mae.

Fannie Mae opposed any attempt to regulate or monitor that business. In 1992, Congress considered a proposal requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to disclose their debt to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Public disclosure of Fannie’s and Freddie’s debt would have allowed the SEC to monitor their business and ensure that these “government-sponsored enterprises,” which were exempt from federal taxes, and had a line of credit with the U.S. Treasury, did not overextend themselves.

He also opposed the use of credit scoring, which is used to determine likelihood of a person repaying a loan.

Johnson told a 1995 conference of mortgage lenders in Chicago that credit-scoring was “a vehicle to do more, not an excuse to do less.”

“We abhor the use of credit scoring as a way to deny housing finance to those people who need help the most,” Johnson said. “We won’t put mechanical systems and arbitrary numbers above our faith in your [local lenders’] judgment and we won’t go back and second guess loans you’ve already made…if they don’t match up to a new way of assessing risks or doing business.”

What a piece of work!

Johnson called the higher interest rates paid by sub-prime borrowers a “tremendous burden” for families and said “it seems we can make A’s out of B’s and C’s in many circumstances” by giving less weight to factors such as divorce or job loss, which would normally lower credit scores.

This Johnson is a clone of James Taggart. He never seemed to care about whether or not these loans could be repaid. All he cared about the *need* of the borrowers.

Check out this video

I think it’s also important to remember how Obama’s beloved ACORN contributed to this crisis.

WHAT exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

{snip}

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA – and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.

There we have it! Obama is just a slicker version of the ebonics ranting Jesse Jackson. Do we really want another Jesse Jackson in the White House?

ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott – an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” – organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

{snip}

IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early ’90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

{snip}

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

So much for the “failed policies of George Bush” leading to this mess.

For once, I’m grateful for the extremely stupid Democrats in the House (along with their smart Republican counterparts). Here’s why Democrats and Republicans said no to the 700 billion dollar bailout.

Some Democratic representatives said the rescue package could have and should have done more.

“I really do think there could have been a better deal,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Democrat from Texas. “There was no mark in the bill for specifically helping Americans — Mr. and Mrs. Main Street — get out of their mortgage foreclosure crisis.”

Jackson-Lee also cited bankruptcy provisions left out of the bill that would have allowed homeowners to restructure their loans. Those provisions were championed by some Democrats during the negotiation period before the vote, but left out because of Republican opposition.

Rep. Joe Baca, a Democrat from California and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, warned on Sunday that the bill might not have enough Democratic votes to pass.

“There’s nothing in here that guarantees new jobs, nothing that guarantees salary increases,” he told The Hill newspaper. “And that’s a huge problem.”

Yeah right. So the government should have hit up taxpayers for more than 700 billion dollars? Hasn’t Jackson Lee ever heard the expression “quit while you’re ahead?”

Also, where in the Constitution does it say that jobs and salary increases are supposed to be guaranteed by the U.S. government? People have the right to look for a job and improve their skills so they become more marketable. This is just one example of why we need to at least raise the voting age.

{snip}

Many Republican House members who opposed the package said it expanded governmental powers and represented a drastic departure from free market principles.

“Congress took a stand for the American taxpayer and free markets. The American people rejected this corporate bailout and [Monday] the people’s House did likewise,” said Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence.

These Wall Street idiots remind me of the character James Taggart in Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus “Atlas Shrugged.” When all else fails get the government to loot the taxpayers on your behalf.

Rep. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, echoed the sentiment during a speech on the House floor Monday afternoon. “The premise of this unprecedented government intervention is that the free market has failed and that government must come to its rescue,” he said. “In reality, the crisis we now face is a result of government intervention in the market.”

Referring to the long-standing governmental guarantee that founded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants that had to be rescued in a federal bailout earlier this year, Flake said, “Those who believe they can control and direct the market’s invisible hand will eventually be slapped by it.”

That’s exactly what Obama would have people believe, and many will take his word for it. The mantra of Obama and Democrats is that it’s all Bush, and capitalism are to blame.

Anyway, John McCain is now saying that President Bush could bypass Congress

Barack Hussein Obama, the socialist, affirmative action Donk candidate, would have us believe that this whole subprime mortgage mess is the fault of the big bad Republicans, and their evil rich backers who made their fortunes “off the backs” of the poor.

But that’s simply not the case. If you look at the facts, you’ll see it’s all about the lefty obsession with “equality of outcome” that got us into this mess. In other words, if minorities, or other poor people don’t own homes, it’s just discrimination/institutionalized racism.

This is the mentality that the government used to force lending institutions to offer mortgages to people who were clear credit risks. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are mostly to blame for that awful Community Reinvestment Act. And there’s also the Community Redevelopment Act. Whorehey Open Borders Bush is not innocent either.

Anyway, here’s more.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the “trickle-down” economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

Our Marxist Muslim presidential candidate is predictably looking to redistribute wealth produced by Americans, to poor countries.

And here’s what it will really cost.

Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development Conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S is expected to meet its part of the U.N. Millennium goals, we would be spending an additional $65 billion annually for a total of $845 billion.

During a time of economic uncertainty, the plan would cost every American taxpayer around $2,500.

In a speech given today in New York, Obama blamed lobbyists, greedy businessmen and complacent politicians for the foreclosure crisis.

Oh puh-leeze! This is all the fault of the government forcing financial institutions not to “discriminate” against people who could never afford homes/mortgages in the first place. And what is it with people these days that they would sit and listen to such a b.s. speech? Here’s an explanation from someone with actual brain cells:

In the 1990s, the last time a Clinton was in the White House, special interest groups and Democratic Congressional leaders criticized the mortgage industry for redlining urban areas, thereby by-passing minority applicants who, they claimed, were unfairly being denied the opportunity for homeownership. Bowing to the enormous political pressure, and facing the first raw data from HMDA reporting that reflected “underrepresentation” of minorities in the mortgage market, underwriting standards and criteria were relaxed.

In fact, as Economics Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas Business School has pointed out recently, “no sooner had the ink dried” on the initial HMDA reports, when the Boston Fed issued new guidelines for mortgage lenders, designed to eliminate what it called “arbitrary and outdated criteria that effectively disqualif(ies) urban and lower income minority applicants.” Of course one of the problems of taking raw data and using it to create policy, is that often the raw data fails to define the whole picture. Prudent governing sometimes requires patience and clarification of important information. As it turned out through a closer analysis of HMDA results, many lower income and minority applicants were shut out of the mortgage market precisely because they were unqualified economically to shoulder the financial burden of a home mortgage payment, due to income and credit problems. Instead of designing economic policies to correct the cause (i.e. create more opportunities for higher income, credit counseling and education) the government did what it does best: it created a dramatic, quick fix. It encouraged the marketing and processing of “sub-prime” loans.

Relaxed underwriting standards meant that credit history, income, assets, savings history, and the overall ability to repay, would be removed from the equation (or its significance reduced), and products would be permitted that avoided the fundamental criteria of good lending practices. Lenders were thusly encouraged to offer products, and underwrite loans in a manner that would be “unbiased,” not as to color, ethnicity, or national origin, but irrespective of financial soundness and the ability to repay. Thus the industry found itself in the unenviable position of being pressured to grant loans to people who were told they did not have to demonstrate the ability to repay, while any demonstrative failure to make minority and urban loans, as reported under HMDA, threatened regulatory retaliation.

Now that the regulators created the mess how do they respond? By pointing fingers at the industry, demonizing the very mortgage brokers and lenders who did everything they could, under existing guidelines, to meet the expectations and directives to make homeownership available to everyone. The sub-prime loan, once the preferred solution to perceived economic disparity, is now a term of derision and outrage. How far we’ve come!

Out on the stump, the hypocrisy is evident. Hillary Clinton, whose husband was President during the relaxation of lending criteria (when it was a “good thing”), now accuses the industry of “predatory lending” and “greed” for having used relaxed lending criteria (now that it is a “bad thing”). Mrs. Clinton is not alone in her new found concern for borrowers. All the remaining candidates, including Romney. Obama, and McCain, have suggested drastic federal intervention in the mortgage market as a method to protect the victims they themselves had a hand in harming. Everything from bankruptcy assistance, judicial restructuring of mortgage terms, and frozen rates, to Billions in federal government foreclosure bailout monies are being suggested.

Now you can be sure, that none of the three candidates will ever say this. They’ll just use this as an excuse to give these financial institutions and the fickle home buyers more welfare.