Author: Mark Noonan

Obama Moves Towards Fixing the Housing Crisis

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Only a bit late, but there is actually something good here – from the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration is examining ways to pull foreclosed properties off the market and rent them to help stabilize the housing market, according to people familiar with the matter.

While the plans may not advance beyond the concept phase, they are under serious consideration by senior administration officials because rents are rising even as home prices in many hard-hit markets continue to fall due to high foreclosure levels…

It was on July 27th, 2010 that I provided a revised plan for fixing housing.  Here is the central part:

…Essentially, increasing demand is not something we can do in any time frame that will work.  And, meanwhile, the longer we go on, the worse it gets.

If you can’t do much with demand, then it is to supply we must turn.  How do we lower the supply of houses actually or potentially on the market for sale?

You turn them in to leased houses.

Millions of potential home owners cannot buy homes because they are out of work, have reduced income or have wrecked credit.  With all that, they still have to live somewhere, and while some of them are in desperate straights, most of them have some sort of income (and, in a lot of cases, just as much income as they had before they lost their homes).  Can’t buy?  Rent.

The trouble is that banks don’t want to be land lords.  This is understandable, and I wouldn’t ask them to be.  But they can put the houses in to corporate structures which do manage rental properties and which can use at least part of the rental income to provide a revenue stream for the banks.  We can put a big incentive on this by making the revenue from rental housing tax free for five years.  The key is that time frame – though we can go as low as two years:  but we want these houses off the market until we have at least a chance of reviving the economy and thus providing a solid base for home demand.

The idea here is to take the massive number of foreclosed homes and lock them away for two to five years – to get out of the housing market the houses which simply don’t have a buyer, and won’t have a buyer for some years to come.  But we can’t just let them sit there unoccupied and deteriorating, nor can we expect banks to just sit on things which don’t produce any revenue.  We also don’t want to increasingly force the banks in to fire sale prices for the homes they hold as that will just accelerate and make worse the problem we have…

I don’t have hundreds of taxpayer-funded staffers.  I’m not some sort of brilliant economist.  I’m just this guy who thinks about things and then writes down what he thinks about – I figured this out a year ago (and, actually, longer ago than that – this is a revised plan, some months earlier I had put it out in a slightly different form).   It just amazes me how completely incompetent government is.  The fact that it is July of 2011 and the housing market has entered a double dip recession before someone in Obamaland starts thinking about this is a sad commentary on the people running the show…they haven’t a clue.  But 2012 is coming and that is starting to concentrate some minds over there.

The one thing we can’t afford to do, however, is have Obama actually in charge of the effort.  All he’ll wind up doing is ensuring that his cronies get a big payday.  We need to really move on this – my plan or something like it.  And to do it right it will have to be genuinely transparent, will have to benefit actual people, and should probably be handled by local banks rather than Obama and Bernanke’s buddies in the “too big to fail” entities.   And given Reid’s background in corrupt land deals, it would probably be better if he was kept away from it, too. The House should take up the idea, craft it in to legislation and then hand it to Obama – doing it in such a manner that it is such a well-done bill that Obama and Reid daren’t try to modify it.

One thing is certain – if we don’t do something, then housing prices could collapse entirely.  And I mean that – like a house worth $125,000.00 today being worth $50,000.00 a couple years from now…and with hundreds of thousands of homes essentially abandoned and deteriorating like Detroit housing.  We’re in a housing death spiral – we have to try and stop it; my plan is to take the houses off the market and leave them for the use of the regular, American people.  If someone has a better plan, I’m all ears…but we have to do something, and do it quickly.

Obama Scuttles Debt Talks

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Seems that the President tried a bit of bait-and-switch in the negotiations – from NRO’s The Corner:

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) offered his side of the story Friday evening, echoing the tone of his letter to House Republicans. He said negotiations with the White House broke down for two reasons: 1) President Obama’s insistence on raising taxes, and 2) Obama’s “refusal to get serious” about spending cuts and meaningful entitlement reform.

Boehner said “an agreement had been reached” earlier in the week that included about $800 billion in new revenue (but not through raising increases). However, the White House on Thursday “moved the goal post” by insisting on an additional $400 billion in tax increases, which Boehner refused to accept. “I take the same oath of office as the president…to do what is in the best interest of our country,” Boehner said. “And it’s not in the best interest of our country to raise taxes in this economy.”…

NRO reports elsewhere that Obama also messed around with some of the proposed spending reforms as regards entitlements.  The bottom line seems to be that a deal was in the making which was acceptable to the GOP but then when it became crunch time, Obama and the Democrats slipped provisions in the GOP had not – and could not – agree to.  I don’t know if this was a poison pill to kill a deal the Democrat didn’t like, at all, or an effort to blindside the GOP (ie, at the last minute put in things that were unacceptable and count on GOP fear of busting up the deal to force them to go along).  In either case it seems to have stopped things in their tracks.  President Obama has called for a White House conference tomorrow – so we’ll see how that goes.

But the good news is that the GOP is standing firm – the revenue increases Boehner agreed to were such that even TEA Partiers could grudgingly accept:  not a rate hike, but a reform of loopholes and such to increase revenues without hiking taxes and killing jobs.  The deal is still too weak in my view – especially as I’m certain that we don’t need to raise the debt ceiling at all – but it did have a solid reduction in spending.  Not nearly enough to get us out of the debt mess, but enough to put off the day of reckoning until at least 2015 or later, thus giving us a chance to replace Obama and get someone with sense in the White House.  My congratulations to the Speaker for smoking out the attempted scam and refusing to be a sucker.

Now, we’ll just see what happens…

Obamunism! Mass Layoffs Rising

Mark Noonan21 Comments

From Yahoo Finance:

Putting pressure on an already lousy job market, the mass layoff is making a comeback. In the past week, Cisco, Lockheed Martin and Borders announced a combined 23,000 in job cuts. (See: Another Retailer Bites the Dust: Borders Doomed by Amazon Deal, Davidowitz Says)

Those announcements follow 41,432 in planned cuts in June, up 11.6% from May and 5.3% vs. a year earlier, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Meanwhile, state and local governments have cut 142,000 jobs this year, The WSJ reports, and Wall Street is braced for another round of cutbacks. This week, Goldman Sachs announced plans to let go 1000 fixed-income traders…

As I’ve said before, I rate my chances of having my job by January 1st at 50/50.  Things are bad and getting worse…and getting worse all around the world.  China’s economy is crawling with bad debt and massively overheating.  Outside of Germany, Europe’s economy has already started to contract and Germany is only a bit above water.  Risk of default is spreading around the world.  Recession stares us in the face, and behind it the prospect of full blown depression.

Only a radical change of course can save the day…and Obama, I believe, doesn’t even suspect there is a problem.

HAT TIP:  Hot Air

Norway Attacked by (Lord Only Knows What)

Mark Noonan97 Comments

From the New York Times:

Powerful explosions shook central Oslo on Friday afternoon, blowing out the windows of several government buildings, including one housing the office of the Norwegian prime minister. The state television broadcaster, citing the police, said seven people were killed and at least 15 injured; a spokeswoman for the prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said he was “safe and not hurt.”

Shortly after the explosions, which appeared to be a bomb attack, a man dressed as a police officer opened fire on a summer camp for young members of the ruling Labor Party on the island of Utoya in the Oslo fjord, about 25 miles from the city, and wounded at least five, a Norwegian security official said…

They’ve arrested a guy who is apparently a right wing nut job Freemason anti-Nazi college grad farmer who likes classical music… from the sources I’ve read…which goes to show one thing very clear:  while Islamists have taken credit for it no one knows what the heck is really going on.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  At least 80 dead.  What a complete horror.

Fighting Discrimination? No, Fighting Common Sense

Mark Noonan4 Comments

A bit of an interesting story from CNA:

Catholic University of America is going ahead with its plan for single-sex residence halls despite a complaint filed on July 14 by Professor John Banzhaf, known for his lawsuits over fast food and women’s bathrooms.

In a July 19 statement provided to CNA, the university said it “is moving ahead with its plans to house the incoming class of freshman in single-sex residence halls when they arrive on campus next month.”

The university said it received a copy of Banzhaf’s complaint and will study it, but it remains “confident that the law does not require that men and women be housed together in residence halls.”…

The story goes on to describe Banzhaf as someone who fights against “discrimination”.  Here in modern America, we are conditioned to think of that as fighting against something bad – discrimination is bad, you see?  Trouble is, discrimination isn’t bad – and, in fact, each and every one of you is firmly in favor of discrimination.  You do it every time you make a choice.

You discriminate between peas and carrots.  Between Ford and Toyota.  Between paper and plastic.  Outside of those commonplaces, you also discriminate in choosing where to live.  Where to work.  Whom to associate with.  You are discriminating all the live long day.  So, why have we become conditioned to thinking that discrimination is bad?  Quite simple – some people wanted to perpetrate a series of injustices but they couldn’t sell it on those terms…so, they magically transformed their desire to do a bad, unjust thing in to a noble fight against “discrimination”.  Such as fighting against the common sense discrimination which would have us separate the sleeping quarters of young men and women.  Endless repetition did the rest – 40 years of fighting “discrimination” and having it endlessly hammered in to us that discrimination is wrong and we’re at the position where the application of common sense (in this case, separating young boys and girls) is startling, and the cause of a lawsuit.

A whole slew of things which are hideously wrong in our society – ranging from mixed-sex dorms to racial set-asides in college admissions as well as scores of other injustices – are built around the created need to fight discrimination.  If we were just after justice, we’d have long ago settled most of our problems and moved on. But there isn’t any money to be made in settling a problem – you can’t get famous that way; you can’t call in to existence vast bureaucracies; you can’t get on television talk shows and write best-selling books; you can’t have whole academic departments set up with cushy jobs and high pay if you are seeking justice.  It was unjust of us to once upon a time to deny opportunity to some people based upon their sex or skin color or religious affiliation…the solution to that problem was to stop doing that.  Presto, we’ve stopped doing that – no one in their right mind would dream of denying someone an opportunity based upon anything other than cold, hard qualifications.  But where is the advantage in such a thing to someone like Banzhaf?  Or an organization like NOW?  Or a whole bureaucracy like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

I’m telling you, good people, we’ve gotten ourselves tied up in knots here – we have been forced to abdicate our common sense and turn ourselves over to people who are scamming us like no tomorrow.  Think, for crying out loud – we have to discriminate.  If we don’t discriminate, then we’re simply not thinking.  You point out to me someone who is actually being denied something on grounds other than qualification and I’ll be right there at the barricades fighting along side you…but don’t anyone ever tell me that I have to fight against discrimination.  To me, that is asking me to fight against thinking – we have to judge circumstances and desired goals and figure out the best means of dealing with the former and achieving the latter.  We can’t do that if we allow cranks on the make to forbid thought because the first application of thinking would destroy their cash cow.

There are truths we must adhere to – right here and now, that college boys and girls should not sleep under the same roof.  Grasp that – hang on to that; make that the basis of your thoughts and actions, and a great deal of mental cobwebs will be swept away.  Discriminate between boys and girls – because boys and girls are different and have different needs and desires and it is up to adults to carefully guide them until they are fully ready to take their place as adults in society.  Once we’ve done that, we can then go on – and on and on.  We’ll start thinking, again…and at the merest touch of common sense, a gigantic amount of irrational nonsense will vanish from our society like a puff of smoke.

Democrats Kill Cut, Cap and Balance

Mark Noonan72 Comments

From Hot Air:

The Senate just voted down the House Cut Cap and Balance bill, 51-46. Reid danced on its grave, proclaiming it “over, dead, and done.” Back to the Democrat plan:

Nothing!

Which is exactly right – the thing to do, now, is to re-pass it in the House, maybe adding a few changes.  You know, deeper cuts to spending, lowering income tax rates, imposing a wealth tax on the billionaires who back liberalism.  Send it right back to the Senate and see if they keep at it…or, some day, come up with an alternative plan.  Either way, we win.

UPDATE:  Turns out this bill is not quite dead – Senator DeMint is going to try and force a vote next week.  Could be done, you know – those “2012 Democrats” don’t want to have a bunch of votes on record against a balanced budget; only need a few of them to break lose and it passes – and then it will be up to Obama to sign or veto.  So, we don’t at this point need to re-pass it in the House…but we should be prepared to do so, just in case.

Poll: Obama Enjoys Modest Lead Over Perry, Bachmann

Mark Noonan53 Comments

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that President Obama would enjoy a modest 44% to 39% lead over Texas Governor Rick Perry. Given that choice, 10% would opt for a third-party candidate and eight percent (8%) are not sure.

A separate survey shows that if Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is the nominee, Obama holds a 46% to 39% advantage. In that case, seven percent (7%) would choose a third candidate and eight percent (8%) are not sure…

Any of you Democrats out there can be happy that Obama is in the lead, but anyone out there who knows politics understands that this is deadly news…outside of us news and politics junkies, probably not half the American people know who Perry or Bachmann is while Obama has 100% name recognition.  Also, any incumbent who is polling under 50% is always in danger – for Obama to feel safe about 2012, he’d have to poll 52% or so against the best known GOPer…and that is Romney, who bests Obama in this poll, 43% to 42%.

The usual caveats – it is way early and just about everything can change over the next 16 months.  Of course, they can also change for the worse as far as Obama is concerned.  The key here is for every last person in the United States to cease thinking of Obama as unbeatable…someone we’d better tailor our candidate to in order to have a ghost of a chance of beating him.  He’s beatable – by anyone.  He could also win against anyone, so don’t look for some sort of perfect candidate either on ideological or marketing grounds.  Look for the person you think will make the best campaigner and the best President…that is whom we must find and nominate.  And then get out there and fight like mad.

After that, it is all in God’s hands and it will be as it will be.

Poll: Americans Support “Cut, Cap and Balance”

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air notes the CNN poll:

…One has to go thirteen paragraphs into the story to find CNN addressing this at all:

“Republicans like the “cut, cap, and balance” approach to the debt ceiling, as do Democrats and independents. Most Americans support a balanced budget amendment, and most, but not as many, think an amendment is necessary to get federal spending under control. A balanced budget amendment passed the House earlier this week, but a vote in the Senate is expected to fail.”

Er, yeah.  In other words, a consensus exists across all political lines that the CCB/BBA approach would be a good idea.  When one scrolls down to the crosstab sections of the raw data, the consensus becomes very, very clear.  The CCB/BBA approach wins majorities in every single demographic — including self-described liberals.  Sixty-three percent of Democrats back the House bill.  The least supportive age demographic is 50-64YOs at 62/37; the least supportive regional demographic is the Midwest at 61/39.  Even those who express opposition to the Tea Party supports it 53/47…

Naturally, CNN buried the story – they don’t really want to broadcast widely a poll of their own showing that Obama and his Congressional Democrats are out of step with the mainstream.  But, it is there – and it is clear:  the people want the government to cut spending, cap it and balance the budget.

The compromise, if the Democrats are at all interested, is to add a mix of tax hikes to CCB.  I know, I know, fellow Republicans – might as well ask us to have our finger nails ripped off.  But, seriously, we do have a liberal, Democrat President and a liberal, Democrat controlled Senate.  While we are clearly winning the debate on what needs to be done, we can’t ignore the will of the people as expressed in 2008 – elections do have consequences and we’ve got Barry and the (liberal) Boys until at least January 20th, 2013.  So, let’s talk compromise – my preference would be to insert my “wealth tax” proposal in to the mix (ie, a tax on wealth in excess of $5 million), but given the realities of the situation, we’d probably have to go along with some sort of income tax hike, though we would want to work it to be least damaging to small and mid-sized businesses.

But that, of course, would be if the Democrats were interested in compromise – or, indeed, if they even knew what compromise is.  They don’t – liberals are entirely “my way or the highway”.  And, in truth, they are rather stuck – if the budget is balanced and government stops growing, there ceases to be a reason for liberalism – as they have constructed it – to exist.  Real liberalism – even though still fundamentally wrong – could continue to exist; but this quasi-socialist, racialist, neo-fascist liberalism of modern America has no place in an America where the era of big government is really over.

For us it is just a matter of holding firm – do not give in.  Just keep insisting on CCB.  The Democrats will either be dragged kicking and screaming to it, or they’ll blow the whole thing wide open and be forced to carry a defense of Big Government in to 2012.  There is no way for us to lose unless we give in.

An American Pope?

Mark Noonan3 Comments

Interesting bit of news over at NRO:

For weeks, rumors were swirling that the retiring, scandal-plagued cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia, Justin Rigali, would be replaced by Charles Chaput, archbishop of Denver. Yesterday, word came that it was official: Chaput, a member of the Franciscan order of Capuchins, would go to Philadelphia…

…A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the possibility of an American pope, as relayed by Inside the Vatican editor Robert Moynihan from one of his Vatican sources, “Father Jeremiah.” At the time, I totally missed the pun Father Jeremiah closed with, when he said it may be time for a “cappuccino.” But in an e-mail this evening, Moynihan confirmed what many readers had told me in the interim — that the cappuccino Jeremiah was talking about was a member of the Capuchin order: “This is what I meant when I told you a few weeks ago that it may be time for a cappuccino. Rome has seen the need for this type of profound, traditional Catholic spirituality . . . and not only in Philadelphia.”…

Archbishop Chaput only rose to prominence a few years ago but his clear thinking, firm defense of basic truth and willingness to challenge a spiritually vitiated society have marked him out as a man to watch.  And Benedict XVI is already 84.  Naturally, no one knows how long Benedict will live – he certainly is vigorous for a man his age.  But it isn’t like he can count on 10 or 20 years.  So, this move (as well as others) are clearing the decks for what will come after.

It would be interesting to see a man of the United States elevated to St. Peter’s chair – and also interesting to see what a relatively young, vigorous and deeply spiritual man like Chaput would do.

Michelle Bachmann’s Headache

Mark Noonan78 Comments

David French explains what is nauseating about the allegations:

…I don’t use the word cowardice lightly.  Here we have former aides who say they’re “terrified” by her condition.  They even deliberately chose to say that she’s “incapacitated” for days at a time and made vague accusations about pill use.  Yet they can’t even muster up the courage to identify themselves?  If the stakes really are so high, surely their patriotism would compel them to come forward so that we can ask some questions, weigh their credibility, and discern whether they had enough access to the candidate to know what she’s endured.  By remaining anonymous we can’t cross-examine them (so to speak) and discover the truth.

Then there’s the evidence.  Or lack thereof.  Anonymous aides expressed terror at her condition, yet if you read the entire article you’ll find that she allegedly missed a grand total of one planned campaign event . . . in 2010.  A second lurid tale concerns a migraine so bad that she merely “managed to attend several events in California, including an appearance before a California chapter of the Eagle Forum and a fundraiser in Palm Springs.”  Oh, but she was “in pain throughout.”  Nice to know…

Anonymous sources do have their proper place – but, in my view, only when corroborated by other hard evidence.  In other words, if you discovered a prescription for migraine medication made out to Bachmann and then went and asked her aides and one of them, not for attribution, confirmed that she suffers from migraines, then you’d have story.  What we’ve got here, however, is just one anonymous denunciation – that isn’t a story; that is a slander.

But the MSM doesn’t really care – Obama and Co are worried sick about Bachmann and so they are giving her the Palin treatment.  Doesn’t matter what it is, just throw it at her…bury her in muck hoping that enough of it will stick, even if false, to incapacitate her as a candidate.  “Smear” will be the mildest description of what Obama’s goons will do to each and every Republican who in any way, shape or form poses a threat to Obama’s re-election effort.

There is nothing we can do to stop them – but we can start going all West on the liberals.  French is a bit sorry for having used the word “coward” – he shouldn’t be.  It was a deceitful, underhanded and cowardly attack…the work of the most disgusting sort of blackguard.  The man who launched it deserves to be whipped.  Hit them back and hit them back hard – ask them again and again and again just why they are so disgusting.  Make their slanders an issue:  that is the way to fight back.

And, meanwhile, just keep up the conservative/libertarian drumbeat.  Let the Democrats alternate between making attacks and answering our charges of skullduggery.  We’ll concentrate on telling the American people what we want to do.  The path to victory is paved with two stones – a stoned labelled “vision” and another labelled “fight”.  Press the vision, keep up the fight…and then we’ll win.