Aug

Lies. Damn Lies. And Statistics

And Then … There’s Obama!

On July 21, when President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, he promised: “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.” How long will this Obama promise last? Well, The New York Times reports today that “the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes,” including a program announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that “will draw on $1 billion authorized by the new financial overhaul law.” That’s right. The Dodd-Frank “no more taxpayer-funded bailouts forever” bill is not even a month old, and already President Obama is using it to turn your tax dollars into yet another bailout.

And here’s the best part: remember how housing values got so wildly over-valued?

Faced with the utter failure of its TARP funded mortgage bailout, the Obama administration is now turning to the left’s old stand-in for housing market interference: the government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae is now working with the National Council of State Housing Agencies to let people buy houses with little or no down payment just like the GSEs did at the height of the housing bubble. And last week, Freddie Mac was also promoting no-down payment loans, this time through an array of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs. All this despite the fact that last week Fannie Mae announced it lost $1.2 billion in the second quarter of this year, and this week Freddie Mac announced a $4.71 billion loss. Both companies were also forced to ask for more Obama bailout cash, including $1.5 billion of your tax dollars for Fannie and another $1.8 billion for Freddie.

So we are going to have billions in bail outs less than a month after we’re told there won’t be any more and to make those bail outs we are using the same techniques that had a large part in causing a worldwide recession.

Can I get an amen?