An Epitaph For The Banking Queen

To paraphrase Charles Krauthammer from his appearance on Fox News the other night, the best thing Barney Frank ever did for America, he did a few days ago when he announced his retirement from Congress.  Indeed, Barney Frank, during his 30 years in office, was perhaps the single most destructive force our country has seen in the past century.

Like all liberals, Frank always claimed the moral high ground for his actions. He justified his most destructive policies on the supposed need to counter racism in the financial industry and to offer help to the lower and lower middle class through the creation "affordable housing." In his wake, he has left America's economy - and indeed, most of the world's economy - a wreck and our nation in decline.

Frank used the canard of racism in the financial industry to eviscerate the credit standards of America's financial industry. He then used Fannie and Freddie to to create "affordable housing" by government fiat.  He set the stage for the spread of sub prime mortgage backed securities throughout the financial industries of the world.  True, countless others bear a portion of the responsibility for these problems.  And indeed, a strong case can be made that Chris Dodd and Bill Clinton share almost as much of the blame as Frank.  That said, my research into our economic decline (see link above), from the creation of the CRA under Jimmy Carter to the present day, has led me to the firm conclusion that Barney Frank is the "but for" cause of our current financial distress..

 

Barney Frank was also detestable for another personality quirk - his utter intellectual dishonesty.  Barney Frank never engaged in an honest disagreement.  His sole style of argument was to demonize his opponents.  Contest his stand on Fannie Mae and it wasn't because you were legitimately concerned with the long term impact, it was because, according to Frank, you hated minorities and did not want to see Americans have "affordable housing."  He was, to quote Bruce, the purveyor of the Gay Patriot blog:

"
. . . a mean-spirited, petty man, wrong about so much, unwilling to admit his mistakes, childish in victory . . . That he will no longer be the most prominent gay politician is a good thing for gay America, a very good thing indeed.
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And as his final act, Frank and his near equally guilty partner in our federally directed national suicide, fellow Democrat Chris Dodd, authored the Dodd Frank Act, ostensibly written to cure the problems that led to our financial crisis.  Talk about your howling cognitive dissonance - it is a law that ensconces the very social engineering and other problems that gifted us this near Depression and that now promise to keep screwing America for decades to come.

 Barney Frank is, was and has been a national disaster on a scale so grand that I really can't think of any other legislator in our nation's history who could plausibly be claimed his equal. I do not know why he is leaving, but I do know this - today has brought a giant step forward for our nation.

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A Shaky Foundation Indeed

Charles Krauthammer had an exceptional article on Friday picking apart the "New Foundation" speech that our Dear Leader in Chief gave at Georgetown. Obama used the speech to outline his plan to take our country on a radical turn to the left - and he did so with mind numbing dissembling.This from the pen of Dr. Krauthammer:

Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama:

The Whopper: The boast that he had "identified $2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade." It takes audacity to repeat this after it had been so widely exposed as transparently phony. Most of this $2 trillion is conjured up by refraining from spending $180 billion a year for 10 more years of surges in Iraq. . . .

The Puzzler: He further boasted of his frugality by saying that his budget would reduce domestic discretionary spending as a share of GDP to the lowest level ever recorded. Amazing. Squeezing discretionary domestic spending at a time of hugely expanding budgets is merely the baleful residue of out-of-control entitlements and debt service, which will increase astronomically under Obama. To claim these as achievements in fiscal responsibility is testament not to Obama's frugality but to his brazenness.

The Non Sequitur: "To make sure such a crisis [as we have today] never happens again," Obama proposes his radical health-care, energy and education reforms, the central pillars of his social democratic agenda. But Obama's own words contradict this assertion. Notes The Post: "But as his admirable summation of recent history made clear, these pursuits have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery." Obama rarely fails to repeat this false connection. A crisis -- and the public's resulting pliability to liberal social engineering -- is a terrible thing to waste.

To interject here, our fiscal crisis resulted from the sub-prime market, government's social engineering in bank lending practices, a bond rating market that completely failed to accurately assess risk, all compounded by Wall Street's development of a new product that failed catastrophically when the market for subprime mortgages came to a grinding halt. Not a single thing Obama has done or proposes to do - beyond new draconian regulation of Wall St. - addresses these fundamental causes of our problems. And indeed, Barney Frank, one of the major architect's of our current disaster, has proposed mandating that municipal bonds be given top ratings for investment despite the real risks associated with those bonds. This is swindle and fantasy writ large.

Now back to Mr. Krauthammer's analysis of Obama's "New Foundation."

The Swindle: The Obama administration is spending money like none other in peacetime history. Obama is smart. He knows this is fiscally unsustainable. He has let it be known privately and publicly that he intends to cure the imbalance with entitlement reform. . . .

In the New Foundation speech, Obama correctly (again) identifies the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid as the key fiscal problem. But then he claims that Medicaid and Medicare reform is the same as his health-care reform, fatuously citing as his authority a one-day meeting of handpicked interested parties at his "Fiscal Responsibility Summit."

Here's the problem. The heart of Obama's health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama's budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion. How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion

I was going to write a pithy conclusion to all of this, but cannot do better than Krauthammer himself:

This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.

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