Wrote About This Six Months Ago...

Back in August I wrote a post about the misguided housing policies of the past and called for some of the more egregious violations of common sense to be stopped. The Obama administration had front and center in most of these policies the typical knee jerk reaction of liberals to either tax, spend or regulate something to death in order to "fix" it. I noted HAMP which is really just a scheme using taxpayer money to prevent foreclosures. It is based on bribery pure and simple. Here is Kevin Williamson of National Review summing it up today in an article over at NRO:

...paying the banks to modify (or pretend to consider modifying) mortgages that they really had no business or interest in modifying. And administration of the program was entrusted to Financial Public Enemy No. 1: Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that did so much to inflate the housing bubble in the first place while enriching its politically connected executives and committing a sustained campaign of outright financial fraud. An economically meretricious bank-bribery scheme run by a known criminal organization: That’s the foundation of the Obama administration’s housing strategy.

Enough already with this harebrained scheme that clearly doesn't work, and was actually set up to never truly work. Setting it up so the incentive to homeowners is to actively skip payments to maybe get one of these trial modifications that I noted in August were not converted to permanent modifications. So I am happy to report that the Republican congress is in the process of sending this ridiculousness to the trash heap of history. Elections do indeed have consequences.