Feds' shortcut to closing wealth gap backfired on minority homeowners (50 yrs in still impoverished)

Orlando Sentinel ^ | Jul 28, 2011 | Mike Thomas

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Did you see the devastating numbers about the wealth of minority families?

Their savings have largely been wiped out. White households now have 20 times more wealth than black households and 18 times more wealth than Hispanic households.

When you consider the large number of minority households in the middle and upper classes, you get a sense of how devastated lower-income families must be to create such an overall disparity.

[snip]

Nearly 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty, we are as impoverished as ever.

There are various reasons. But a big one is this: The federal government turned home ownership into an affirmative-action program, complete with quotas. And a lot of people who had no business buying houses bought them and then lost them.

"As sad as it is to say, this began in the Clinton Administration as a response to the argument that the poor and minorities couldn't get credit and were being left out of the home-ownership dream," says James Wright, a sociology professor at University of Central Florida. "They couldn't meet credit requirements. There was a lot of pressure in progressive circles" to change those requirements.

To further this goal, Fannie Mae agreed to buy high-risk subprime loans in 1999. This meant lenders could sell the loans to unqualified buyers and then dump them on Fannie and the taxpayers.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development set a goal that, by 2001, half the portfolios of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should be composed of loans to low-income and moderate-income buyers.

Once Freddie and Fannie were fully engaged in the subprime business, the market went crazy. Lenders enticed unqualified and unsophisticated borrowers into signing loans they couldn't possibly pay off.

[snip]

This was social engineering run amok.

[dirtboy]

This was a classic (and typical) political error.

It is not the act of home ownership that leads to accumulation of wealth - it was the act of learning fiscal discipline that led to home ownership and only then did it lead to accumulation of wealth.

If you give someone a mortgage without them learning how to manage their finances first, they will not be able to hold onto that house. There are no shortcuts. But politicians always like to think there are, because selling the concept of gain without pain is usually an easy vote-getter.

[Anti-Bubba182]

In no case will the information in the article help end the failed welfare state. What it will be used for is to increase welfare due to the evil White people having the money.

[rbg81]

“When blacks realize what the Democratic Party has done to them, watch out.”

---

I doubt it. It much easier to believe that the cause is the generic “Racism”. And, sadly, the promise of the next freebee down the road is just too tantalizing to resist.

[Vintage Freeper]

The War on Poverty, like all socialistic schemes, transfers wealth from those who create it to those who consume it. Whatever government subsidizes, you get more of it. Giving money to the poor does not reduce the number of poor people, it creates more of them.

The converse is also true. When you take wealth from producers, you get fewer people producing wealth.

Socialism is a negative sum game. Taking wealth from producers and giving it to consumers, results in more consumers and fewer producers. Society as whole becomes poorer.

Over time, the negative wealth production compounds. Everybody is progressively impoverished until society finally collaspes when the few people who are still producing decide to leave and produce somewhere else that is less punishing of production.

[Jabba the Nutt]

Let's say you are a KKK style racist, who hates blacks and wants them harmed. What would your strategy be?

Wouldn't you want to destroy the black family? How? Get the men out and replace them with a welfare check. Destroy any discipline in government schools, force all the black kids into the government schools, where simple warehousing and no learning takes place.

I could go on and on with policies to destroy blacks. Cut to the chase, THEY are LIBERAL policies. So, you put a black figurehead on top of the liberal policies, put the pedal to the metal. Only rubes and nitwits are surprised that the results hurt blacks. Actually, that's the purchase.

Speaking of rubes and nitwits, did anyone see O'Reilly's interview with Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Mex)? He's surprised that Obama lied to him in 2008, when he campaigned with him, that Obama was not going to push "Comprehensive Immigration Reform". Rube! Dupe!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

....He's surprised that Obama lied to him in 2008...

".......As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you." -- Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists—and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now—a principle they denounced as "racist" then—even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars.But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity—often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?............." David Horowitz

[driftless2]

"ain't gonna happen"

I tend to agree. The worst oppressors of average black Americans for the past forty years are those self-appointed leaders of the black community like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and the like. They've done more harm to the aspirations of black Americans than all the white racist orgs have done for one hundred years.

[driftless2]

"banks...forced by gov"

I see you caught the lie in the article as well. Lending institutions had a gun put to their head by the feds telling them to either make x number of loans to unqualifed applicants or unpleasant things would happen. The scribbler didn't mention that in his article.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Talk is that Al Sharpton will have a nice megaphone to keep stirring racial hatred with a primetime show on MSNBC.

[ex-Texan]

This Is What A Collapsing Ponzi Scheme Looks Like !

Excerpt:

Housing Market Headed Off A Cliff. 10.8 Million Mortgages At Risk

* * *Obviously this is going to significantly drive home prices further down, as I reported a few weeks ago, 28% of US homeowners already owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth. A recent survey by Fannie Mae found that 27% of American homeowners are considering walking away from their mortgage. A perfect storm is brewing.

As prices continue to drop, with 10 million now at risk of default, a strategic default movement could devastate the “too big to fail” banks that caused this mess in the first place. * * *

Mostly Greenspan's fault but the 'to big to fail banksters' are all greedy bozos, too

Housing Bubble Leads to Deflation of Real Estate

I predicted all this in 2005. Pardon me while I take a long laugh break . . . LOL !

[kearnyirish2]

“Generational poverty — learned at the knee of mothers waiting for the check in the mail — destroyed family unit, courtesy of the great society and government is your daddy = crippled, dependent society.”

You’re absolutely right.

[supercat]

I wish more people would wake up to the fact that bail-out policies which protect companies from losses while letting them keep their winnings are an unbounded money hole. The lower the cost of engaging in a behavior, the more people will engage in it. If the costs are reduced to the point that one can expect a profit from the behavior, the number of people engaging in it will explode.

It is disgusting how many people are surprised by such things when they are in fact entirely predictable.

[triumphant values]

Single mother who dropped out of high school? Single guy with no high school degree and a criminal record? Married couple with stable jobs? Married couple with kids? Educated individual with a professional degree? Skilled worker like a plumber or welder? Sort them out according to similar groupings, and I doubt if you will see much difference in household wealth. It isn't about color--it's about the way you choose to live and work.

But yours are irrelevant groupings to the conversation. It's the proportion of people in those groups as a percentage of the population as a whole that tells the tale.

[kearnyirish2]

Thanks

[kearnyirish2]

“The scribbler didn’t mention that in his article.”

Is is never mentioned in coverage of this problem; the banks for the most part knew who was creditworthy & who wasn’t, but didn’t have the requisite melanin profiles, so they were forced to make bad loans (with the burden borne by those customers who pay their bills).

[Cincinatus' Wife]

WOW. That’s some graph.