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Do Democrats Ever Learn from the Past?

September 22, 2009 by B. Daniel Blatt

The unhappy Barney Frank is at it again.  Like many Democrats, this mean-spirited man from Massachusetts, has such faith in the power of government to right all wrongs that his House Financial Services Committee is moving forward on legislation to expand the reach of the Community Reinvestment Act.  Yup, you read that right.  So, what if that legislation contributed significantly to last fall’s financial meltdown.  Barney’s fellow Democrats think it just needs a broader reach so, his committee

. . . is holding hearings on legislation supported by the Obama administration that would bring insurance companies and credit unions under the umbrella of CRA, placing new lending demands on these groups and opening them up to protests and pressure tactics by organizations like Acorn. As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini. Any review of the history of the affordable mortgage movement in America demonstrates the power that CRA had in helping to shred mortgage underwriting standards throughout the industry and exposing us to the kind of market meltdown we’ve experienced.

It was, as Steven Malanga (who wrote those words above), the CRA who got ACORN “into the mortgage business.”  The controversial left-wing group used the Carter-era legislation “as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities.”

Andith the CRA, Congress pressured the Department of Housing and Urban Development which, in turn pressure the Government-Sponsored Enterprise, Fannie Mae, to buy up “billions of dollars worth of CRA loans.”  Johnson’s bill, Byron York informs us, “would ensure more of that by applying CRA’s lending requirements not just to banks but to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders.”

I guess for Democrats one financial meltdown just wasn’t enough.

But, it’s not just in trying to expand this one program which had disastrous consequences for our economy where Democrats act as if history begins with their good intentions.

With his call for slashing our nuclear arsenal, the President returns to a policy he advocated in college.  Back then, he faulted the Reagan Administration for its intransigence and “twisted logic,” even though the Gipper’s policies have been, in Tom Elia’s words, “vindicated by events.”  Wouldn’t a wise man, a new kind of politician, learn from his mistakes and the successes of his ideological adversaries and the policies he once opposed?

But, Obama moves forward as if the Cold War never ended and the Berlin Wall never came down.

It’s not just on national security policy where he hasn’t learned from the past.  The President also favors economic policies akin to those with no record of success.  He pushes forward on increased government involvement in the health care sector of our economy despite abundant evidence that such involvement will only drive up costs and possibly lead to a rationing of services.

We are regularly assured that unlike their Republican counterparts, Democrats are realists, not ideologues, who study the facts of a situation before reaching a conclusion and offering legislative solutions to remedy any problems they find.  Instead, it is they who are the ideologues, certain that any domestic problem requires a government solution and any international problem requires us to be less aggressive and more conciliatory.

And they do so without any evidence that the policies they espouse which sound so good in the abstract (especially when propounded by a gifted orator) actually work in the real world.

Filed Under: Arrogance of the Liberal Elites, Big Government Follies, Congress (111th), Obama Health Care (ACA / Obamacare)

Comments

  1. Croft says

    September 22, 2009 at 9:18 pm - September 22, 2009

    ACORN illegality and impropriety be damned! More more money for the moochers and looters!

  2. V the K says

    September 22, 2009 at 9:58 pm - September 22, 2009

    To Democrats, history started last Tuesday. That’s how Dear Reader can be impatient that a 5,000 year old conflict hasn’t been settled in the first nine months of his presidency. Of course, he’s also a classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder, so he can’t understand why the Palestinians and Israelis aren’t groveling at his feet.

  3. Nate says

    September 22, 2009 at 11:34 pm - September 22, 2009

    Just curious, but where was the evidence that CRA contributed to the housing bubble? From what I have found, very few of the foreclosed homes had CRA loans.

  4. Leah says

    September 22, 2009 at 11:47 pm - September 22, 2009

    I have never seen such and attempt to nationalize so much of our economy so quickly, car companies, banks, student loans, healthcare and now this. All I can do is pray that it is a major over reach.

  5. shigley says

    September 23, 2009 at 12:01 am - September 23, 2009

    Fannie Mae has deep pockets to buy off Barney, Et Al, not unlike the last time.

  6. ThatGayConservative says

    September 23, 2009 at 2:35 am - September 23, 2009

    Just curious, but where was the evidence that CRA contributed to the housing bubble? From what I have found, very few of the foreclosed homes had CRA loans.

    Did you bother to look? Interestingly:

    “Our approach to our lenders is ‘CRA Your Way,’ ” top Fannie executive Jamie Gorelick told the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2001. “Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders’ portfolios; we’ll package them into securities; we’ll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination. …”

    Fannie promised to buy billions and billions of dollars worth of CRA loans because it was under pressure to do so from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in turn was under pressure from Congress, which set ambitious quotas for low- and moderate-income loans.

    Is there nothing Jamie Gorelick has touched that hasn’t turned to shit?

  7. Sean A says

    September 23, 2009 at 3:18 am - September 23, 2009

    There is only ONE thing that Democrats consistently learn from history: that it must be re-written.

  8. American Elephant says

    September 23, 2009 at 4:43 am - September 23, 2009

    Ah, but Gorelick gave herself tens of millions in bonuses for encourging all those bad loans to begin with! Shes made herself a multimillionaire while destroying millions of peoples lives and livelihoods.

  9. ILoveCapitalism says

    September 23, 2009 at 8:59 am - September 23, 2009

    where was the evidence that CRA contributed to the housing bubble?

    Regulators were out there pressuring banks to lower their lending standards, using the CRA as a cudgel against the banks who (rightly) balked. Here is one example:
    http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/capital-commerce/2009/3/17/yes-the-community-reinvestment-act-really-did-help-cause-the-housing-crisis.html

    Of course, the CRA wasn’t the only cause or even the prime cause, as most people acknowledge. I blame the Federal Reserve first and foremost; then the management of Freddie and Fannie, and the Democrats who refused to regulate them. (It would have been right to regulate them because they weren’t really private enterprises; they were/are quasi-government entities, whose actions put us taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions.) The CRA “contributed” as you put it.

  10. Bill Nola says

    September 23, 2009 at 10:43 am - September 23, 2009

    I guess we are going to get more CRApy loans

  11. V the K says

    September 23, 2009 at 11:34 am - September 23, 2009

    where was the evidence that CRA contributed to the housing bubble?

    How did forcing banks to loan money to people who couldn’t pay it back *not* contribute to the housing bubble?

  12. North Dallas Thirty says

    September 23, 2009 at 11:41 am - September 23, 2009

    There is only ONE thing that Democrats consistently learn from history: that it must be re-written.

    And that is why the Obama Party keeps making the same mistake over and over again; their history books are continually redacted to remove the previous time it happened.

  13. Kevin says

    September 24, 2009 at 4:45 pm - September 24, 2009

    No, Dan, they don’t. There is no other explanation.

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