Bubble or no bubble, a property is worth what the market will pay for it at the time of the sale; no more, no less. If you bought a house for $350 thousand and nobody will pay you more than $250 thousand now, you are not owed $100 K. Yet Republicans and Democrats continuously voice the quaint and vacuous idea that an owner whose mortgage is worth more than his house ought to be compensated somehow. Ditto declining property values.
You don’t have a property title in the perceived value of your property. Nobody does. Suck it up.
Recall, during the first evening press conference of his presidency, Obama had forewarned of his intention to “help homeowners that are suffering foreclosure or homeowners who are still making their mortgage payments, but are seeing their property values decline.”
Update III: Attorney General Eric Holder demanded an honest conversation about race. He got it from the intrepid Pat Buchanan. The thing is, Holder doesn’t really want a two-way exchange. What he wants is a one-way “conversation,” where brothers like him talk AT the errant American people. The kind of “conversation” one might have with G-d. Pat Buchanan was having none of it. Watch Pat have that frank discussion against the protestations of his interlocutor.
Feb. 18: For electing a black president, you get called “a nation of cowards on issues involving race.”
So hissed the newly appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, as he promised to lead the nation to “to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our greatest president”:
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards,” Holder said in remarks to his staff in honor of Black History Month. His comments appear on a transcript provided by the Justice Department.
“Even as we fight a war against terrorism; deal with the reality of electing an African-American, for the first time, as the president of the United States; and deal with other significant issues of the day, the need to confront our racial past and to understand our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country — that all endures,” the attorney general added.
“Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”
Holder said that the Department of Justice, in particular, bears a singular responsibility.
“And we, in this room, bear a special responsibility,” he said. “Through its work and through its example, the Department of Justice — this Department of Justice — as long as I’m here, must and will leave [sic] the nation to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty, this is our solemn responsibility.”
Holder said that the country is now a “fundamentally different” place than it used to be, but that the nation “still had not come to grips with its racial past, nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have.”
“To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race,” he said.
As I said, “Non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans, who harbor no racial animus, believe racism saturates their society. As they see it, in electing Barack Obama, they’ve begun to atone for their original sin.”
To get an inkling of what’s in store, read about Obama’s “Uncivil Agenda.”
This might edify too (that’s right; expect nothing from the GOP):
Update II (Feb. 19): Is she playing “Did you know?” Or is she playing at increasing the racial hostility and entitlement, also the hallmarks of black identity?
“‘Did you know that African American slaves helped to build this house?’ First Lady Michelle Obama asked a group 6th and 7th graders on a visit to the White House Wednesday, an event celebrating African American History Month.”
The First Lady would help her constituency more if she okayed a few internships mowing the White House lawns.
Update III: Attorney General Eric Holder demanded an honest conversation about race. He got it from the intrepid Pat Buchanan. The thing is, Holder doesn’t really want a two-way exchange. What he wants is a one-way “conversation,” where brothers like him talk AT the errant American people. The kind of “conversation” one might have with G-d. Pat Buchanan was having none of it. Watch Pat have that frank discussion against the protestations of his interlocutor.
Feb. 18: For electing a black president, you get called “a nation of cowards on issues involving race.”
So hissed the newly appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, as he promised to lead the nation to “to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our greatest president”:
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards,” Holder said in remarks to his staff in honor of Black History Month. His comments appear on a transcript provided by the Justice Department.
“Even as we fight a war against terrorism; deal with the reality of electing an African-American, for the first time, as the president of the United States; and deal with other significant issues of the day, the need to confront our racial past and to understand our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country — that all endures,” the attorney general added.
“Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”
Holder said that the Department of Justice, in particular, bears a singular responsibility.
“And we, in this room, bear a special responsibility,” he said. “Through its work and through its example, the Department of Justice — this Department of Justice — as long as I’m here, must and will leave [sic] the nation to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty, this is our solemn responsibility.”
Holder said that the country is now a “fundamentally different” place than it used to be, but that the nation “still had not come to grips with its racial past, nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have.”
“To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race,” he said.
As I said, “Non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans, who harbor no racial animus, believe racism saturates their society. As they see it, in electing Barack Obama, they’ve begun to atone for their original sin.”
To get an inkling of what’s in store, read about Obama’s “Uncivil Agenda.”
This might edify too (that’s right; expect nothing from the GOP):
Update II (Feb. 19): Is she playing “Did you know?” Or is she playing at increasing the racial hostility and entitlement, also the hallmarks of black identity?
“‘Did you know that African American slaves helped to build this house?’ First Lady Michelle Obama asked a group 6th and 7th graders on a visit to the White House Wednesday, an event celebrating African American History Month.”
The First Lady would help her constituency more if she okayed a few internships mowing the White House lawns.
“After more than a decade of unsustainable borrowing and spending, the private sector is currently attempting to restore balance through reduced consumer and mortgage credit, greater savings, and lower asset prices. With its trillions of dollars of credit injections and stimulus programs, the government hopes to allay this process by force-feeding Americans a diet of more borrowing. They feel that a restored securitization market will help. It won’t. It will just grease the skids for a quicker collapse.
Credit, whether securitized or not, cannot be created out of thin air. It only comes into existence though savings, which must be preceded by under-consumption. Since savings are scarce, any government guarantees toward consumer credit merely crowd out credit that might otherwise have been available to business. During the previous decade too much credit was extended to consumers and not enough to producers (securitization focused almost exclusively on consumer debt).
The market is trying to correct this misallocation, but government policy is standing in the way. When consumers borrow and spend, society gains nothing. When producers borrow and invest, our capital stock is improved, and we all benefit from the increased productivity.”
Updated (Feb 19): “All credit is debt,” explained the brilliant Henry Hazlitt. “All loans, in the eyes of honest borrowers, must eventually be repaid. Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.”
