Obama’s an Optimist, But Not a ‘Sap’
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 19th, 2009 5:36 am by HL
Obama’s an Optimist, But Not a ‘Sap’
After the most action-packed first three weeks of any president since maybe Abraham Lincoln, President Obama revealed a subtle but significant change in tone: Maybe bipartisanship wasn’t all that it had been cracked up to be. “Look,” he told five columnists on board Air Force One last Friday, “once a decision was made by the Republican leadership to have a party-line vote — a decision that I think occurred before I met with them — then I’m not sure that there was a whole host of things that we were going to do that was going to make a difference.”
Upside Down Economics
From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us. What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market’s “greed.” That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case. An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: “Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century.”
