Conservative Shortcuts

This is a very good summary of the Boy King administration's responses to the historic financial crisis they created. Essentially, the BK's need to politically pay off his rich backers by deregulating the financial markets crashed head-first into his political need to hoodwink the poor into voting for him. That's truly the definition of tragedy: when one political need conflicts with another political need. Policy? Oh, please, do not start on about "policy." Conservatives don't do "policy," wonk-face.

So much has been written on this story, let me just add one more boot to the conservative's ribs.

See my friends, the way that the Rovians were trying to get poor folk and minority types to vote was by putting them in their own houses. It was a George Bailey-Bedford Falls kind of approach. See, folks could drive cabs, even be immigrants (including Eye-talians, right Mr. Martini?) and still get nice houses. Okay, it would be more like dealing with Mr. Potter than George Bailey, but that's how the game's played. Suck it up, floorsweep.

Okay, so in the BK's head, markets get all deregulated, and the chattel get houses. But how do they pay for them? The answer, as it turns out, is that they never do.

See my friends, predatory lenders and other Republicans figured out how to hide the actual cost of a house loan and got lots of poor folk to sign up for them. It was Dreamy! All those smelly half-hobos in their own houses, and the good rich people flushed with market cash. Yay!

Then it turned out that lots of poor people shockingly had no money and all those mortgage instruments that were being traded for real money were worthless. Who could have known that people with less money would end up not having enough money?

There are two points here that nobody is yet talking about.

First: the Repubs have spent the last 30+ years fighting to suppress the wages of working people. So the fact that people can't afford stuff is because Repubs think rich people should have that much more money to keep the rest of their money warm or something.

Second: so when Repubs want to hoodwink working stiffs into voting for them, they come up with slogans like "The Ownership Society." But they don't do anything to help people raise their wages. It's like the BK's own rise to coronation - you just get the thing. You don't spend the whole time earning or creating anything, you just want it and get it.

When the Repubs wanted poor people to have houses - boom! There's your houses! Don't talk to Repubs about raising real wages or fair lending practices or any of that boring still that makes rich people roll their eyes. Take the shortcut. The BK and most Repubs never worked for anything - they want a house, they take a house. So don't bug them with the part where value is, you know, somehow generated through effort. Just get Elmer and Judy a damn house.

Liberal spoil-sports like to whine: "that's unsustainable! That causes huge tragedies in peoples lives when they lose the homes that they weren't told they couldn't afford in the first place!" Well Boo damn Hoo!

It's just stunning that they really believed that predatory lending was the key to home ownership. Like that was the problem. The American conservative movement has been revealed as the world's greatest Ponzi scheme.

And it's quite revealing that home ownership levels are now almost exactly back to where Bubba had them. You know, wassitcalled, Reality.