News, Research & Insights for American Homeowners, Patriots & Constitutional Conservatives
"I was totally unprepared because of the way people talked."
Via Newsbusters and Ace, who points to Karl’s piece in the Greenroom as a reminder that our very open-minded friends on the left have a little echo-chamber problem of their own. Says Jay Cost: The problem for the left is that they do not have a lot of interaction with conservatives, whose intellects are often [...]
Bad day.
“‘The government had in my view as bad a day as it reasonably could have,’ said Tom Goldstein, founder of SCOTUSblog and a regular litigator at the high court. ‘It won’t cause the government to have a complete cardiac arrest — they’ll just be nauseous for months. … The only people coming out of that [...]
Moral hazard, moral hazard, moral hazard.... How often have we heard that as a reason for why principal reductions can't be done. As if it were the worst thing in the world.
As an initial matter, we don't have to do principal reduction in a way that creates moral hazard, such as making principal reduction contingent on default and no strings attached. (To put it another way, we don't have to be stupid about the way we do principal reduction.) One solution would be principal reductions contingent on level of negative equity, not on default. Another would be to offer principal reductions only to those who have already defaulted (I don't like this because it penalizes those who kept paying, but the point is that it avoids moral hazard inducement). Another possibility would be to make principal reductions contingent upon paymentshared appreciation, which doesn't have to be a 50-50 split. Instead, it could be that initial appreciation goes all to the lender and then it starts to shift to the borrower.
But let me suggest something counterintuitive and heterodox. Principal reduction is a case in which we WANT to encourage moral hazard. To understand why, you need to start with the understanding that our goal here is macroeconomic, not moral. The goal is stabilizing the housing market and the the economy, not balancing the moral cosmos and bringing harmony to the Force (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Making principal reduction contingent upon default means that there will be a bunch of people who default just to get the principal reduction. That's a "ruthless" group of people who are quite likely to be strategic defaulters otherwise. They are precisely the people who need to get principal reductions to incentivize them to stay in their homes in order to stabilize the market. We might not like rewarding people who would act opportunistically like this, but if you accept the issue as macroeconomic, not moral, then the results are what matter: fewer foreclosures and a stabilized housing market.
Guns don't kill people, hoodies do?
As a gun-rights advocate, I constantly have to remind people that guns are a tool, not an entity with motives, and that the responsibility for its use lies with the shooter. For some reason, we have an impulse after tragedies to try to blame objects rather than people, or more likely, to blame everyone else [...]
Guns don't kill people, hoodies do?
As a gun-rights advocate, I constantly have to remind people that guns are a tool, not an entity with motives, and that the responsibility for its use lies with the shooter. For some reason, we have an impulse after tragedies to try to blame objects rather than people, or more likely, to blame everyone else [...]
Uh oh.
Faced with the reality that his chances have collapsed, the Sweater Vest begins to unravel: “You win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going [...]
Gentle criticism.
Rick Santorum today gently criticized House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s latest budget effort — but at least it was from the right rather than the left as was Newt Gingrich’s “right-wing social engineering” criticism last year: “He’s put forward a great blueprint for people to campaign upon and shows clearly progress dramatic progress in the direction [...]
Endgame.
I really did think it was too dumb to check. I saw this column in the Post yesterday and passed on blogging it because I figured it’d turn out to be an exaggeration. Nope. That’s what I get for giving the benefit of the doubt to a guy who worries about people on food stamps [...]
Operation Fast and Furious, explained.
If you wanted to “really brainwash” people against guns, how would you go about it? Ask people to start buying anti-gun ads to combat what some might see as a pro-gun bias in entertainment (skipping MacGyver, of course). What if that didn’t work? Well, if you got a chance to be Attorney General, you might [...]
Change!
Barack Obama has put on his public face of concern over high gas prices. Steven Chu has reversed his 2008 insistence that American gas prices needed to rise to European levels in order to make alternatives more competitive and people more desperate for them. Is any of this sincere? Morgen Richmond of the now-moribund Verum [...]
Change!
Barack Obama has put on his public face of concern over high gas prices. Steven Chu has reversed his 2008 insistence that American gas prices needed to rise to European levels in order to make alternatives more competitive and people more desperate for them. Is any of this sincere? Morgen Richmond of the now-moribund Verum [...]
Insanity.
The definition of insanity might not be doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but in attacking people when they ask you about your definition of insanity. Our friend Jason Mattera confronts comedian Chris Rock about his allegations that the Tea Party is “insane” and “racist,” and, well … [...]
A fact a day keeps the doctor away.
Clay Johnson knows a thing or two about new media; he’s the founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. As Karl Rove reportedly once said, “Blue State Digital! You guys do great things for the wrong people!” Johnson was also the director [...]
Right. So why is it?
Michelle Obama has made Let’s Move – an anti-childhood obesity program — her signature initiative as First Lady. President’s wives often take up causes that aren’t particularly controversial and pursue non-governmental solutions to widespread personal problems, but Mrs. O has taken a decidedly political approach to her pet project, bringing considerable pressure to bear to [...]
What could possibly go wrong?
Lest we lose sight of it amid all of the presidential primary news, Wisconsin is going to hold some recall elections. The people have spoken! Petitions have been gathered and now the democratic process will play out in true blue American fashion. So… just when will we be seeing these elections take place? Even the [...]
Update.
Between the contraception kerfuffle and the GOP primaries, the MSM has had too much to cover to tackle the fallout from Fast and Furious, too. Just kidding. Even if nothing else were going on, you’d still hear this news from just a handful of people. The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle reports this morning that the [...]
Disappointment
We always knew that once new voter ID laws were in place, some people were going to fail to qualify at their polling place and a predictable amount of sturm und drang would result. Well, it’s already taken place in Ohio on Super Tuesday. Had it been some person who lacked an ID card because [...]
Evah.
Sounds like she means it in a “I can’t believe how mean people are to the RINOs” way whereas I mean it in a “these candidates are terrible beyond my wildest imaginings” way. But let’s not quibble over petty differences. Let’s find common ground. Worst campaign evah: The 2012 presidential campaign may have eight months [...]
Eulogy.
Via Breitbart TV, which is posting eulogies of him as they become available. He’s one of the few people in media whom I regret not having met, partly because experiencing Hurricane Breitbart firsthand must have been a trip and partly because the blog friends we have in common obviously adored him. His public persona was [...]
"Wow. Is that how people see me?"
The man who tried to kill Ronald Reagan is apparently unhappy that people tend to think of him as… the guy who tried to kill Reagan. (Hat tip: OTB) John Hinckley is still locked up in the home for the terminally confused, but his lawyers are trying to improve his situation. That means that interviews [...]
Hypocrisy
Regular readers know that I’ve had a long standing beef with PETA. (Pun fully intended.) This is an organization which has taken the noble, worthy cause of helping out animals in distress and turned it into a misguided and frequently dangerous cult, frequently doing more to harm legitimate animal care initiatives than to help any [...]
Irony.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow may be their leading purveyor of irony — of the unintentional variety. Jim Geraghty and Hugh Hewitt both caught this missive from Blow’s Twitter feed, in which he slams Mitt Romney for his concerns over the eruption of children born out of wedlock in the past 50 years and [...]
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