At the Center for Economic Policy and Research, Dean Baker's "Beat the Press" blog takes on a hoary icon in George Will Spreads Some Lies About the Economic Crisis:
It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government "compassion" for low-income families.The facts that Will musters to make this case are so obviously off-base that this sort of column would not appear in a serious newspaper. But, Will writes for the Washington Post.
The first culprit is the Community Re-investment Act (CRA). Supposedly the government forced banks to make loans against their will to low-income families who did not qualify for their mortgages. This one is wrong at every step. First, the biggest actors in the subprime market were mortgage banks like Ameriquest and Countrywide. For the most part these companies raised their money on Wall Street, they did not take checking and savings deposits. This means that they were not covered by the CRA.
Let's try that again so that even George Will might understand it. Most of the worst actors in the subprime market were not covered by the CRA. The CRA had as much to do with them as it does with Google or Boeing. ...
There were also numerous cases of some really seriously misguided "compassion." There were many community groups and foundations touting the rise in homeownership even when it should have been apparent that this increase was being driven by people were using junk mortgages to buy homes at bubble-inflated prices. If there was truth in labeling, the "asset building" programs pushed by many of these outfits would be called "asset shrinking."
But it is a tremendous re-write of history to blame misguided do-gooders for the core problem. Good old-fashioned capitalists were making money hand over fist and they were doing it largely without government support, except for the implicit too-big-too fail (TBTF) guarantees that ensured that outfits like Citigroup and Bank of America would survive no matter how reckless they had been. If Will wants to blame the government because of the implicit subsidy of TBTF then he has somewhat of a case. But the argument in this article belongs in the fiction section.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003:
The look on Donald Rumsfeld's face lately has not been a happy one. As the Bush Administration and its defenders try to pretend that the war in Iraq is not going badly, the reality is that things are getting worse with little hope for a solution in the near future.Viceroy Jerry has asked for 50,000 troops to maintain his rule. There's one small problem with that. There aren't 50K to give. The US military is nearly at the end of it's deployable strength and needs to withdraw the 3ID as soon as possible.
Let's look at the numbers:
So far deployed to Iraq are the elements of seven of the US's 10 active duty combat divisions, making up half the combat power of the US Army. Only the First Cavalry Division is fully deployable from the US. Bosnia is now being covered by National Guard combat battalions and Kosovo was supposed to be covered by units now in Iraq.
Then there are our committments in Korea, Afghanistan and other sundry places.
Michael O'Hanlon argues that we desperately need help from our allies to relieve the burden in Iraq.
OK, now didn't we disregard our allies sane, rational, and logical suggestions about how to deal with Iraq? Now, we expect Japanese and Korean troops, forget French and German to help us out?
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