Lessons (not) Learned

If some of the things you read here by us in this post sound a tad repititious, don't blame us but rather those who wish to keep repeating the same mistakes.

President Obama made a rare admission of a policy misstep Wednesday, acknowledging that his administration failed to provide enough support to struggling homeowners and recognize the scope of the nation’s housing crisis.

Despite predictions by Obama’s advisers that the housing market would rebound by now, real estate prices are falling once again. And the administration’s efforts to push banks to modify the mortgages of families who missed their monthly payments have been widely criticized as lacking.

Obama first raised the issue Wednesday when a questioner during a town hall event asked what mistakes the president had made in handling the economy.

“The continuing decline in the housing market is something that hasn’t bottomed out as quickly as we expected,” Obama responded.

Later, he added, that his administration’s efforts to help struggling homeowners were “not enough.”

“And so we’re going back to the drawing board,” he said.

Step away from the drawing board, please!


The administration's series of tax credits and home-owners' assistance programs is reminding us, in a sense, of Cash for Clunkers in that one of its "accomplishments" was that it merely stole demand from the future, propping up housing prices in the short term only to see them fall again once those programs expired.

Instead of allowing the market to take its course and wring the bad actors out of the system, they insist on employing one round of Keynesian gimmickry after another, prolonging the agony, promoting market uncertainty and forestalling what would be any real and natural housing recovery.

As it stands, however, the President shows his colors as a true believer in that the statist solution for failed statist policies is simply more statism.