Dino:

We could do this all day. But let’s just say you win and you can celebrate your victory like you did Nov. 4th when McCain/Plain won and the republicans took back Congress.

Once again you are a dumb fuck.

Just because I don’t drink DNC koolaid doesn’t mean that I voted for McCain. I didn’t.

As usual, Dino is an idiot.

We weren’t discussing what percentage of people in rural areas meet the US governmental definition of living in poverty, which itself is a controversial definition, but whether for those who are in poverty, whether rural poverty is “worse” than urban poverty. (See this for a more complete exposition.)

The straight up answer is that it is not, and that the arbitrary definition of poverty in terms of mean national income artificially inflates the number of people who are in poverty in rural areas compared to urban areas. Anybody with even a modicum of sociology exposure would know that.

The problem is as follows: For 2007, US government defines people who are “in poverty or at risk of being in poverty” as those who have an annual income less than $21,027.

This might be useful to assess national poverty levels, but it is completely useless as a metric for comparing urban versus rural poverty. The reason is that the cost of living in cities is typically much higher than the cost of living in rural areas. You can own a home on $20,000 in the country in the South, where the cost of a small house goes for around $60,000. There is no way you could own a home in a city where housing costs might approach $200k for a similar home.

Any definition of poverty useful for comparing urban to rural poor would have to do it in terms of whether the person had access to adequate shelter, enough food to remained nourished, access to heating and cooling, etc. When people look at the problem that way, the first thing they find is that instead of 30 million people living in full poverty, the number is closer to 1 million… and that rural poverty is virtually non-existent.

The reason for this again is simply that life is cheaper in the country, but salary levels are similar (and there is no differentiation for federal government support in terms of rural versus urban).

So once again, Dino isn’t just wrong, he’s completely ignorant of basic facts that any student in an average high-school environment would have been exposed to.

Hey “OLD GREG,” Dino You suffer fools gladly, seeing yourself as wise.

When govt mandates bad business practices to attempt to implement social engineering, the result is disaster.

bankers’ behavior is NOT going to be influenced by the prospect of federal regulators and ACORN lawsuits. There is a basic reality called “incentives,” and if you create incentives NOT to adhere to sound loan policies, you are going to get unsound loans.

Exactly!

We’re so far ahead of most cities we can’t even see them in our review mirror. There is no dead zone in Old Town, it is thriving and redeveloping so fast I can’t afford to live there. But we even have housing for low-income down there. We care about people here and that’s why Portland is always on the list of the world’s greatest cities.

All cities have poverty, indeed you people are the ones who cherish poverty as it makes you feel ahead of someone. Poor gather in cities because that’s where the services and resources are.

But rural poverty is even worse. Much of it concentrated in the rural south. The difference is that we try nad alleviate the suffering of the poor while the rurals reject them. I can post statistics on that.

This is what you typed Carrick:

Blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah.

Just a bunch of verbal nonsense to try and refute FACTS from a reputable source. But what else can we expect from a group who holds conservative nutjob beliefs?

Next time come back with something factual.

Whatever one says about obstruction, it does kinda demonstrate that the GOP didn’t have free rein from 1994 to 2006, doesn’t it?

Game.Set.Match.

You lose again, Dino and RealityChallengedBoob. Thank you for providing the petard for your hoisting.

I don’t think Dino is Diane. There was a touch of femininity to her comments that is absent from Dino’s.

Republican President
Republican Congress
Republican Federal Reserve

Total republican control 1994-2007

Economic meltdown

Republicans at fault.

I do love this one though:

He’s a blind organ grinder who’s lost his monkey, playing cacophonous and discordant marxists tunes for anybody stupid enough to listen— hoping that his equally blind sycophantic brethren will be a grateful enough audience to drop a coin or two into his dystopia-laden tin cup.

Poor brainstem must have been up all night writiing that one. The big words alone must have taken hours to research.

preview is your friend

Oh robbie, you are too much! Republicans broke the records for filibustering EVERYTHING from 2006 (actually, the new COngress isn’t in session until 2007 giving them one short year to fix the samage of 30 years of republican rule- with a republican president no less!) to now.

Face it. Your guys FAILED and were thrown out of office. I would have done far worse.

Oh Mr. Bear:

The definitive article on the CRA and why conservatives are deluded:

Subprime Suspects

Edward Lotterman: Don’t believe the myth about the fiscal mess

See if you can comprehend this one:
Most subprime lenders weren’t subject to federal lending law

This one might make your head explode:

Misunderstanding Credit and Housing Crises: Blaming the CRA, GSEs

This one requires a higher level of understanding. Kind of academic. Get a kind liberal to explain it to you:
Fannie Freddie data

AP IMPACT: Mortgage firm arranged stealth campaign

Lower cost, people are nicer and more likely to share my political views outside of New York. But you just can’t beat the food here.

In rural settings there is often no zoning at all, and you will find very poor folk living literally right next to high-end neighborhoods.

Somebody’s got to do the lawn. (And that is in fact a good thing.)

Dino styled fiction:

DEMOCRATS WERE SHUT OUT OF ALL POLICY-MAKING.

Fact: Not only were they not shut out, their active oppositionalism was key in preventing timely response to the GSE crisis in 2004.

You can flaunt your fantasies as much as you want, but I’ll just keep bringing the facts back into your face.

Republicans didn’t just oppose new topic legislation, they opposed necessary spending bills.

The only “necessary” spending by federal govt is for national defense and a few other items. The Dems waste trillions on wasteful social engineering schemes that don’t work. Someone has to stop them.

Dino:

You simply refuse to believe the evidence that contradicts your deeply held beliefs that poor people are the root of all evil.

I think you refuse to accept any evidence that your beloved Democratic Party is responsible for this meltdown.

Queue video footage from 2004 House Subcommittee on Government Sponsored Enterprises:

What’s to argue? Your side fought regulatory oversight of your sacred cows and now we all must pay the price for this.

Dino:

Only the insane would blame democrats or sunspots.

Power was shared between Republicans and Democrats over the time that this fiasco occurred (that’s how our representational democracy works), and the negative role played by Democrats is unassailable.

Only a koolaid drinker like yourself would try to argue against these basic facts.

Of course it’s Bush’s fault.

It was Bush who wrote the CRA and signed it into law.

It was Bush who put Franklin Reines and Jaime Gorelick onto the board of Directors of Fannie Mae.

It was Bush who worked as a lawyer for ACORN while they were pressuring banks to make more subprime loans.

It was Bush who personally filled out the loan documents for low income individuals including illegal aliens and people on public assistance.

It was Bush who sued banks to force them to lower their lending criterea.

It was Bush who received millions of dollars of behing-the-scene contributions from sub-prime criminals Herb and Miriom Sandler.

It was all Bush’s fault.

It’s sort of like education. The more you get the more liberal you become.

…

Interesting how Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters etc… are coming out smelling like roses.

So the convo seems to have went:

Dino: You’re all terrible humans. You’re also stupid. Here are a bunch of links to liberal sites that back me up.

Bear: Um, your links contradict you….

Dino: Screw you you’re stupid.

Well duh, of course many of you aren’t urban creatures. It shows in your backwardness and fear of anything and all things outside a narrow comfort zone.

That’s why cities and for the most part the media, are more liberal than the typical American. They’re exposed to more variety- in lifestyle, type of people, income levels, races. The more one is exposed to differences they more liberal you become. It’s sort of like education. The more you get the more liberal you become.

COoservatism has its roots in low-grade fascism, one of the defining hallmarks being fear of those who are different. However, the overriding characteristic of the garden variety con is authoritarian.

Republican control of Congress 1994-2007
Republican President 2000-2007
Republican Federal Reserve 1987-present
Conservative free-market economic policies pursued 1980-present

Results:
$11 trillion debt (doubled in last 8 years)
Record deficits (projected $1 trillion)
Recession approaching depression
Auto industry destroyed
real estate industry destroyed
financial services industry destroyed
widespread bank failures
quickly rising unemployment
income equality at record high

Thank you, republicans.

There’s really little else to say. If you are in charge of a project at work and all your friends are on the team, you’ve had the project for years and it goes sour, do you blame the people who DIDN’T run the project?

No, you take your lumps, resign and get the heck out of Dodge. Now it’s time for the republicans to SCOOT.

That should read “rural poverty is a bigger problem than urban”.

But the end result is the same- YOU PEOPLE ARE WRONG AGAIN!

No problems, Hairy
What’s your line?

I’ve posted links time and time again about who was repsonsible…

Your information is wrong, which makes your premises wrong, which leads you to your wrong conclusions. GIGO

Stupid, wrong little chew toy.

Dino, while certainly Greenspan, Bernanke, and Bush have a share of blame for encouraging our credit culture, it’s also just as certain that mandating loans to poor credit neighborhoods and allowing welfare payments to be used as collateral bear a share of blame here.

Is that so complicated? You allow Barack Steve Obama to sue banks for (allegedly) failing to abide by the CRA, you are going to get that bank modifying its policies to avoid future debacles.

Is.that.so.darned.complicated?

Now if we assume that banks are in business to make a “profit,” we would assume that whatever diversions from that mission are going to be in the direction of “less optimal” results. Hence, absent a LOT of contrary evidence, we would expect that the CRA would yield a TON of foreclosures in the inner cities it was designed to “help.”

And that, my friend, is EXACTLY what is seen. A friend of mine who looked into Minneapolis properties found that many of them were selling for 75% less than they were before the Barney Frank/Fed/Fannie (ha ha) bubble popped.

And Nobel prize in economics? Look up Leonid Kantorovich; they awarded a prize for “optimal allocation of resources” to a guy who came from a place with bread lines (USSR). Hayek only got one co-awarded with…another Communist. So the Rijksbank prize doesn’t always mean much in terms of sound economics.

No dead zone in Portland?

Bullshit. I saw it with my own eyes, Dino. It starts around the Convention Center and extends across the river into Chinatown, where…ahem…let’s just say I’ve had far better Asian food in the suburbs. That’s also where the rescue missions are.

Just because government has jacked up real estate prices by preventing development in outlying areas doesn’t mean that the area is thriving. It means that they’ve artificially reduced supply, driving development across the Columbia into Washington.

But somehow those super-smart liberals seem to run into some difficulties reading a map, or looking into complex concepts like “supply” and “demand,” and somehow fail to figure out that it’s not exactly an environmental “win” for someone to live on the other side of the greenbelt and drive into the city every day for work.

Republican President
Republican Congress
Republican Federal Reserve

Total republican control of Congress 1994-2007
Total republican control, Congress & Presidency 2000-2007
Totla republican control Federal Reserve 1980s to present

Economic meltdown 2006, 2007
Depression 2009

Republicans at fault.

Impressive, Hairy!

Dino, no comprehensive analysis of the CRA is going to persuade me that bankers’ behavior is NOT going to be influenced by the prospect of federal regulators and ACORN lawsuits. There is a basic reality called “incentives,” and if you create incentives NOT to adhere to sound loan policies, you are going to get unsound loans.

If you accept welfare payments as evidence of ability to pay a mortgage, you are going to find more welfare recipients with mortgages than otherwise. You can find out where a lot of them live by looking at a foreclosure map, especially one for inner cities.

It’s really not that complicated; one can contrive any number of metrics that supposedly “refute” what went on, and the answer should be the same; look at the incentives created, and look at a foreclosure map of the inner city. No Nobel winner can refute the reality of this.

Lessee….if I believe Dino, I must assume that the prospect of federal regulators shutting down banks for noncompliance with the CRA had nothing to do with them issuing risky loans in areas they used to spurn, and that the pleas of a Fannie boy-lover (ha ha ha) had nothing to do with the failure to adequately regulate Fannie and Freddie.

Yeah, regulators NEVER take note when the guys FUNDING them speak. NEVER. Government NEVER, EVER screws up financial markets, even when they admit as much.

There’s NO conflict of interest when Barney Frank takes a Fannie executive (ha ha) as his boy-lover.

Um, Dino, no matter how much the “experts” try to spin this one, it’s still planted firmly in the ground. CRA was and is a disaster, as are Fannie and Freddie.

Uhuh. I’m not a one-legged Somali boy either. I should just stfu and thank my lucky stars.

Republican President
Republican Congress
Republican Federal Reserve

Total republican control 1994-2007

Econommic meltdown

Republicans at fault.

“The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far, it’s working for us.”

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.)

Robert108, you make a good point about not having a lot of political capital. That was in fact the root of the problem: Bush had so much political capital tied up in the Iraq War that he was forced to let other things slide.

Had the Democrats been a bit more functional and less prone to simply being oppositional, things would have been different. It clearly was a strategy on the part of the Democrats to put their party’s interests over that of the country, because they saw that as their way to regaining political power within the country.

There. Did you all have fun pretending my evidence doesn’t exist? Did all you Nobel Prize winning economists come to the conclusion that the political party out of power and exPres Carter were responsible for the meltdown?

Great! Just what I expected from a bunch of brainstems!

I’ll bite on this one, Dino:

1. Dan Gross claims that the GOP is blaming minority homeowners. That’s a basic straw man argument; we blame the CRA and Barney Frank, but see the minorities as victims of the Democrats.

2. Lotterman ignores the fact that the CRA does allow lawsuits, and the discovery process alone can cripple a bank. Yes, Mr. Lotterman, there are perverse incentives to the CRA. Lotterman also ignores the increased enforcement during the Clinton administration.

In other words, Lotterman argues against a nice….straw man, again.

3. Krugman is arguing that the holder of about half of mortgages, according to his own data, has nothing to do with the troubles in the mortgage market? I guess this is what one would expect from an “economist” who believes that hurricanes are good for the economy, but it’s hardly an argument.

I’m afraid your sources are, when viewed closely, really missing the issue. Without the imposition of weak lending standards by the government, including below market rate loans from the Fed, the real estate bubble doesn’t get started.

Now that doesn’t mean that bribery from Fannie and Freddie (and their Democratic executives) wasn’t a problem, or that idiots issuing loans they knew were bad wasn’t a problem, either. It does, however, mean that government involvement WAS a problem.

Now if you’ve got a coherent argument about why setting up perverse incentives through the CRA and the Fed doesn’t matter, let’s have it. To this point, however, you have not addressed the real argument that conservatives are presenting here.

Bob’s got a little friend now! I think Dino is impressed with his “graph.” I don’t know why you bother to answer Dino, guys, he just loops the same info over and over. Boring.

Example of Dino’s abysmal ignorance of the facts:

But rural poverty is even worse. Much of it concentrated in the rural south.

Bullshit again.

You have no fucking clue what you are talking about, and are largely just pulling shit out of your ass.

I’ve seen urban poor and I’ve seen rural poor, and if I had to make a choice, I’d choose rural poor any day. That looks like owning your own home (modest size, one-bathroom) with AC, one or more cars, a decent amount of land, etc. That isn’t a contradiction with being poor: In the South for example, land is cheap enough and housing costs low enough, you can own your own home for about the price of renting a modest sized apartment so many people do….

Also rural poor don’t have that problem with apartment blocks taken over by drug lords, large scale gang activity, etc etc etc.

You’re just a clueless dumb fuck.

Dino=GIGO

Dino:

If rural people are so worthless, I’d suggest that you boycot food that isn’t grown INSIDE in an urban farm or processed in an urban plant. You might also want to boycot leather that comes from rural cows, cotton that comes from rural fields, wool that comes from rural sheep, and wood that comes from rural sources.

While your at it, you might want to avoid using energy because a lot of rural people work in the coal mines and on the oil platforms.

an hour outside any major city is East Bumf*ck. It has nothing to do with being urbane or being exposed to people who might be different.

You are so full of S***.

I’ve lived in LA and now live in rural CA. In both instances I lived and worked in/with majority Hispanic populations. The only difference is that in rural CA there’s more openess between cultures. Whites go to Mexican festivals, Mexicans show up a country music concerts, everyone drives a truck.

In LA, people are scared of each other and keep to their own more. All those cases where someone is murdered and all these people know and do nothing take place in big cities. If I was attacked in my home town, a dozen people would come to my assistance, some with brown skin, some with white.

Dino:

ere, let me post the article from the AP (no doubt a liberal nest of commie spies):

Bush administration ignored clear warnings
Under pressure from banking industry, U.S. government eased lending rules

Nice link to a secondary source again.

Do you know the difference between primary and secondary sources? If so, what’s this constant insistence on secondary ones, when primary ones exist?

Look, I’m fully happy to extend the blame to whoever is responsible for this mess, and am even willing to accept that the Bush administration screwed up on this, like they did so much else. But the principle causes are the CRA itself and the distortions in the marketplace that it created, and the resistance of Democrats to reform of the GSEs. Those are established facts.

Bush likely was not proactive enough to head off this crisis before it got to the full scale conflagration that we have now, but that’s a failure in leadership, not in fundamental philosophy or associated policy choices.

“….some with brown skin, some with white.”

But all ignorant, fearful and backwards. Like I said, people move to rural CA out of fear and discomfort with diversity found in cities.

Interesting that the example used was “if I was attacked”. Even in your small, supposedly safe rural communities you conservatives are filled with fear and anxiety. You see danger everywhere. You live in constant fear.

For those might have missed this:

Republican control of Congress 1994-2007
Republican President 2000-2007
Republican Federal Reserve 1987-present
Conservative free-market economic policies pursued 1980-present

Results:
$11 trillion debt (doubled in last 8 years)
Record deficits (projected $1 trillion)
Recession approaching depression
Auto industry destroyed
real estate industry destroyed
financial services industry destroyed
widespread bank failures
quickly rising unemployment
income equality at record high

Thank you, republicans.

One thing that needs to be stressed that CRA created a presumption of guilt when groups like ACORN accused banks of “redlining.”

The only way banks could prove their innocence was to make stupic and risky loans.

But banks were faced with a problem. They had to make so many bad loans to satisfy CRA, but not so many that would be swamped by the risk.

The Clinton administration made two changes:

1. It increased the number of bad loans a bank had to make to prove its innocence.

2. It directed Fannie/Freddie to buy those bad loans, repackage them as mortgage backed securities, and sell them back to the private sector.

Bike Bubba :

I don’t think Dino is Diane. There was a touch of femininity to her comments that is absent from Dino’s.

Well that’s unfortunate, because she was equally entertaining to run loops around logically. Never can have enough rhetorical punching bags in these grave times.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac curried favor with Congress by championing affordable housing–a mission that filled their balance sheets with risky subprime and Alt-A loans and allowed them to enjoy years of lax congressional supervision.

By late 2004, Fannie and Freddie very much wanted subprime and Alt-A loans. Their accounting had just been revealed as fraudulent, and they were under pressure from Congress to demonstrate that they deserved their considerable privileges. Among other problems, economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office had begun to study them in detail, and found that–despite their subsidized borrowing rates–they did not significantly reduce mortgage interest rates. In the wake of Freddie’s 2003 accounting scandal, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan became a powerful opponent, and began to call for stricter regulation of the GSEs and limitations on the growth of their highly profitable, but risky, retained portfolios.

If they were not making mortgages cheaper and were creating risks for the taxpayers and the economy, what value were they providing? The answer was their affordable-housing mission. So it was that, beginning in 2004, their portfolios of subprime and Alt-A loans and securities began to grow.

http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28664/pub_detail.asp

Sorry I misunderstood.

Hey Geologist, I work with geos and they’re not nearly as think as you are. Keep believing what you want, the people with BRAINS know the truth.

Did you have time to find a liberal to read you the story in the newest issue of the New Yorker where it talks about how free-market, deregulatory, conservatism-based policies were the cause of the crisis? How Greenspan and Bernanke, both republicans, were warned things were going wrong and they ignored it?

No matter. We punished you at the ballot box TWICE now and your ideology is GONE for generations. Oh sure, it will still have its devotees but they’ll be laughed off as crackpots and jerks.

Oh and Hairy? Lay off the drama. You lost the election(s). We’re nowhere near building you work camps in the Gulag.

Yet.

Dino, You are so insecure… Keep it up Cpmrade! I am sure your devotion will go far in the upcoming Obama administration. Good luck with that. IF you were able to take a more realistic look at History, You would know that authoritarianism is more a left wing impulse than conservative.

Being a bear, I of course have never been attacked by humans (not in LA, not in NYC, not in San Francisco, and not in Rural CA).

But living in LA I had 2 cars stolen within a 9 month period. I’ve also lived in apartment complexes that have been vandalized and had several units robbed. So urban crime is not something I’m paranoid about, it’s something that’s affected me.

Where I stayed in pre-Guliani NYC, graffiti covered the walls of every building as high as a person can reach standing on a chair. Every panel sided private vehicle in the neighborhood was covered in graffiti. None of the cars had hub caps because they would be stolen. And this wasn’t a bad part of NYC, this was Flushing.

Once I was in subway car when it came to a halt for about 20 minutes. The reason the subway shut down was because some “wilding” youths had thrown an elderly man off the subway platform.

Once it took me about 45 minutes in NYC to find a restroom that could be used by someone who wasn’t a customer. Because so many rest rooms had been vandalized, business owners reasonably excluded non customers from their rest rooms. It wouldn’t take anyone 45 minutes to find a restroom in Redding, CA or Bend Oregon or Fernley Nevada.

P.S. What the hell does all this have to do with mortgages either?

.. let alone have any hope of refuting it.

Which in this case is impossible because for him to do so, he would have to either prove that the US Government does not set the poverty level based on annual income below $21k (for 2007) or he would have to prove that the cost of living is not much lower in rural areas compare to urban ones.

There Dino…. I apologize for having so many words for an obvious simpleton like yourself. Can you see the conflict now, or do we need to present it to you with crayons?

Wow, it’s Dino the wonder SPAMbot.

Who apparently likes looking like a complete idiot.

You do a better job discrediting yourself that I ever could.

Carry on.

Dino stop spamming the same comment. It doesn’t make what you say more true or less true.

yeah nice graphic Bob.

What it demonstrates is that the Democrats are much more likely to take a vote to the floor for a cloture vote than was done historically. (After all if you don’t have the votes, why take it to the floor?)

What does that tell us, oh brilliant one? Other than this is another dose of DNC koolaid that you are swallowing.

And by the way, there is something positively hysterically funny about how it’s OK with you boobs when the Democrats were being obstructionistic pre 2006 (or in that pathetic Dino’s world view, apparently impossible), but now that the Republicans are employing the same proven tactic, that’s somehow only now bad.

Record for filibusters: Republicans in the 2007 Congress.

Previous record: Early 90s, republicans.

Investors Business Dailey:

The CRA coerces banks into making loans based on political correctness, and little else, to people who can’t afford them. Enforced like never before by the Clinton administration, the regulation destroyed credit standards across the mortgage industry, created the subprime market, and caused the housing bubble that has now burst and left us with the worst housing and banking crises since the Great Depression.

As we said, Clinton beefed up the CRA and used it to force banks to subsidize poor communities with close to $1 trillion in high-risk loans and other commitments that flouted underwriting rules.

Myth: The CRA could not have led to financial Armageddon, because the overwhelming share of subprime mortgages came from lenders that were not banks and not regulated by the CRA.

Fact: Nearly 4 in 10 subprime loans between 2004 and 2007 were made by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. And that doesn’t include loans made by subprime lenders owned by banks, which were in effect covered by the CRA.

What’s more, the biggest subprime lender, Countrywide, while not subject to the law, still came under federal pressure to make risky loans in minority communities.

Clinton created a separate department at HUD to police “fair lending” at Fannie and Freddie and also at lenders like Countrywide, which became Fannie’s biggest client. In 1994, Countrywide became the nation’s first mortgage lender to sign with HUD a “Declaration of Fair Lending Principles and Practices.”

As a result, Countrywide made more loans to minorities than any other lender — and not surprisingly, was one of the first lenders swamped by loan defaults.

Other lenders felt the heat from Reno’s Justice Department, which prosecuted them for failing to operate enough branches in black neighborhoods. Reno put the entire banking industry on notice about the CRA and her enforcement program.

Myth: The CRA did not force anyone to do subprime loans or take excessive risks.

Fact: Subprime loans were the vehicle banks used to satisfy CRA compliance, and Clinton and his regulators encouraged their use. Before Clinton took office, subprimes were virtually unheard of. By the time he left, they made up more than 9% of the market for mortgage originations. Today they’re 20%.

Myth: Greedy investment bankers, who securitized and sold subprime mortgages, drove us to the credit crisis, not government.

Fact: Clinton’s regulatory policies led to the creation of this new risk on Wall Street. His CRA amendments created the subprime market, and only after he pressured Fannie and Freddie to socialize the risk and guarantee the profit from the subprime loans did Wall Street get involved in a big way.

Republican control of Congress 1994-2007
Republican President 2000-2007
Republican Federal Reserve 1987-present
Conservative free-market economic policies pursued 1980-present

Results:
$11 trillion debt (doubled in last 8 years)
Record deficits (projected $1 trillion)
Recession approaching depression
Auto industry destroyed
real estate industry destroyed
financial services industry destroyed
widespread bank failures
quickly rising unemployment
income INequality at record high

Thank you, republicans.

I’m poor. I have a deeply held belief that rich people who want to keep me poor by giving me welfare instead of opportunity to show my merit are the root of all evil.

You’re “poor”?!
Dang!
You are obviously eating on a semi-regular basis.
You have access to the internet, wheither through work or a personal IP.
Friend, you need a trip to the copper range in Mexico to truely appreciate the wealth you have.

Dino,

Just read the Lotterman article you cited. Am I crazy, or does he end his article with the following:

Those who argue the Community Reinvestment Act is a root cause of subprime problems often also point to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lowering their standards in response to political pressure, especially during the Clinton administration. This criticism is very solid. But that is the subject of another column.

So the blame isn’t on the CRA… but still on the government?

Then I took a look at the Paul Krugman graph you cited.

Either I am crazy, or Paul Krugman is blind. His own graph shows that government-backed mortgages went from 0% to 40% of the mortgage pool since 1977 (isn’t that when the CRA was passed?).

Krugman then says that the fact that gov-backed mortgages dipped from 50% to 40% between ’05-’08, they cannot possibly be the cause of the housing bubble. HUH? This is year by year data. That means in ’08, gov-backed mortgages still accounted for 40% of the mortgages taken THAT YEAR. That means of ALL the people who took out mortgages in ’08, 40% of them still got their shit gov-backed. This is supposed to somehow show that gov-backed mortgages did not account for a HUGE (40%) of the mortgages taken during the housing bubble?

Yea, private-backed accounted for 20% — that’s still not 40%. If we go with the numbers, then Fannie and Freddie are still TWICE as culpable for the crash as private banks are.

Krugman’s analysis operates on the flawed assumption that an increase or decrease in percentage of the backing is what led to the bubble. I’m pretty sure that if a bank loans a STATIC amount every year, it is that STATIC amount that adds to its liabilities at the end of the year. So decreasing from 50% to 40% between ’05 and ’08 doesn’t change the fact that during each of those 3 years, Freddie and Fannie added 40% of the national mortgage debt PER YEAR to their TOTAL liabilities.

In sum, Krugman is a dipshit for lying to idiots that can’t think better. You’re a dipshit for being an idiot who can’t think better.

It’s impossible to reach you brainstems on this topic. You simply refuse to believe the evidence that contradicts your deeply held beliefs that poor people are the root of all evil.

As I said on another post, read the story in the newest issue of the New Yorker and you’ll see the whole history of how free-market capitalism promoted by the Fed’s conservative economists caused this crisis.

I know you won’t because it’s long and complicated and can’t be reduced to a simplistic view of the world.

Dino=diane? It’s certainly stupid enough.

Dino: According to your articles the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 did not contribute to the subprime mess. But the 1999 NY Times Article “Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Lending” does not even mention the CRA, but does mention Clinton’s Pilot Plan, along with 24 banks, to put millions of poor people into subprime housing loans. To say that the subprime mess was not the product of the CRA is not my arguement. But Clinton’s program is.
DEFEND THE 1999 ARTICLE.

It’s amazing how some on the left act as though anyone who espouses free market, pro-liberty principles is some sort of a plutocrat.

That’s because if we’re not plutocrats, then we must be:

1) Insane, or
2) Stupid, or
3) Unfair for wanting our talents to give us an advantage over the untalented.

That’s because if we’re not plutocrats, then we must be:

1) Insane, or
2) Stupid, or
3) Unfair for wanting our talents to give us an advantage over the untalented.

Yeah. We’re real bastards for believing a meritocracy is a good thing.

Carrick, I really don’t see why we should ever continue obstruction to be a bad thing. Gridlock in Congress is generally a positive, and I certainly don’t want to see Republicans just going along with a Democrat agenda.

I want to see them go along when the Democrats get something right, but if the Democrats are wrong they should be opposed.

One party obstructing the other is how it’s supposed to work.

I’m poor. I have a deeply held belief that rich people who want to keep me poor by giving me welfare instead of opportunity to show my merit are the root of all evil.

I’m not particularly rich either.

It’s amazing how some on the left act as though anyone who espouses free market, pro-liberty principles is some sort of a plutocrat.

There are times in my life when going on welfare would have been a heck of a lot easier than going to work. But I never did that.