by Hans Bader
November 16, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
Federal affordable-housing mandates were a major factor in the mortgage crisis, fueling the housing bubble and the subsequent collapse of the housing and financial markets, which helped bring down the economy. Even the liberal Village Voice has admitted that. Who drafted those awful mandates? ACORN, reports the Washington Examiner, in “How ACORN Destroyed the Housing Market.”
How did ACORN cause the “housing bubble” and “financial collapse”? ACORN lobbyists drafted “affordable-housing” mandates to pressure the mortgage giants to buy up more risky loans and mortgages…
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by Hans Bader
October 01, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
“Stimulus” packages that increase government spending don’t work, notes Harvard economist Robert J. Barro in the Wall Street Journal.
The administration claimed that Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector.
Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worse in the recession.
Obama claimed his…
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by Hans Bader
June 14, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”
Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously…
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by Hans Bader
June 12, 2009 @ 11:27 pm
Obama is firing an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered wrongdoing by a prominent Obama supporter and opposed letting him off the hook.
Ironically, when Obama recently nominated a liberal judge to the Supreme Court, his Administration trumpeted Walpin’s support for her.
Walpin is the Inspector General for the Americorps program, which is riddled with waste, fraud, and ideological misuse of taxpayer funds. Walpin “has been doing a good job” and he has “identified millions of dollars in AmeriCorps funds that were wasted or misspent,” notes Senator…
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by Hans Bader
April 21, 2009 @ 11:02 am
President Obama will sign into law a $6 billion “national service” boondoggle. In the March 31 Washington Examiner, I described how the “Americorps plan will waste money on ideological causes” like rent control and more lenient sentences for violent criminals:
“Despite exploding deficits, President Obama and congressional leaders are backing a $5.7 billion “national service” boondoggle. Obama’s proposed budgets, which break his campaign promise of ‘a net spending cut,’ will already increase the national debt by $9.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget…
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