Saturday, February 27, 2010

Weekend Newsbites: Sat./Sun. February, 27/28, 2010


You want to know why I hate Republicans just slightly less than Democrats...

Read the first newsbite.
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13 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.taxpayer.net/search_by_category.php?action=view&proj_id=3244&category=Federal%20Budget&type=Project

Anyone who has gone on a diet knows that as soon as you start fibbing – holiday snacks don’t count, Super Bowl dip is light (colored), there are no calories in Ben & Jerry’s while the freezer is still open – you might as well hang it up. You may even gain weight while dieting. Many lawmakers claim that the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) budgeting law enacted two weeks ago will put government on a diet. Well, considering the loopholes and exceptions, we better not pull a scale out any time soon.

Baseline spending increases are allowed under PAYGO, meaning annual spending is going to increase without any offsets, regardless of whether tax revenue covers the increase or not.

Other gimmicks and outright loopholes further limit PAYGO’s impact. It’s easy to disguise budgetary costs so they don’t have to be offset, and a series of exceptions are made for “emergency” and popular legislation. In fact, out of the 22-page bill, there are five pages dedicated to carving out PAYGO exceptions for some of the expiring Bush tax cuts, estate tax changes, relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax and increased Medicare payments to doctors. These exceptions add up to trillions of dollars worth of calories that don’t have to count against the nation’s budgetary diet.

The first bill affected by PAYGO in the Senate was the so-called “jobs” bill. It was immediately slapped with an “emergency” label and exempted from PAYGO.

Not only was [PAYGO] readily cast aside when Congress first faced a difficult spending decision, but the authors [of the spending bill] used a variety of gimmicks to hide the real cost. In a classic bait and switch, the price tag was advertised at $15 billion, but the highway provisions in the bill alone will cost $47 billion over ten years.

* 13 "REPUBLICANS" VOTED FOR THE BILL -- Alexander (R-TN); Bond (R-MO); Brown (R-MA); Burr (R-NC); Cochran (R-MS); Collins (R-ME); Hatch (R-UT); Inhofe (R-OK); LeMieux (R-FL); Murkowski (R-AK); Snowe (R-ME); Voinovich (R-OH); Wicker (R-MS)

* OF THE DEMOCRATS, ONLY ONE VOTED "NAY" -- Nelson (D-NE)

February 27, 2010 at 10:59 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/426321/ducking-and-dodging/stephen-spruiell

‘We have some strong disagreements on the numbers,” President Obama said after Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) concluded his devastating critique of the Democrats’ budget claims, “but I don’t want to get too bogged down.” In the ensuing debate, what became clear is that the Democrats just don’t have an answer to Ryan’s arguments. They ducked, dodged, and changed the subject repeatedly, because Ryan’s numbers themselves are unimpeachable.

The Democrats are touting an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that their health-care bill would reduce the deficit by around $130 billion over the next ten years. What Ryan pointed out — and what no Democrat even attempted to counter — is that this is because the legislation front-loads tax hikes and Medicare cuts and defers costs, forcing the CBO to score ten years of offsets with only six years of spending. Looked at on a level playing field, the true ten-year cost of the bill is $2.3 trillion rather than $950 billion...

Then [Ryan] brought up another gimmick: The bill is full of double-counting. “Savings” are counted as offsets for new health-care spending and at the same time set aside to pay for future entitlements. For instance, the Democrats claim $52 billion in offsets as a result of increasing Social Security payroll-tax revenues. But these dollars are already claimed for future Social Security beneficiaries. They can’t pay for both. The Democrats take another $72 billion in premiums intended to fund a new long-term-care program and count them as offsets for other spending. Ryan pointed out that Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad has called this “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”

Perhaps most important, Ryan confronted the Democrats with the issue of the “Doc Fix” — a separate bill that would have added $371 billion to the Democrats’ legislation if it hadn’t been stripped out. The Doc Fix would have prevented Medicare reimbursements to doctors from plummeting by 21 percent, a drop that Congress put into the bill to improve its CBO score but never planned to allow...

Neither Obama... nor any other Democrat addressed the issue of double-counting. And the only response to Ryan’s point about the Doc Fix was a rather oblique statement by Obama that “if what you’re saying is that we can’t make hard decisions on entitlements, then we’re in big trouble.”

In fact, that’s exactly what conservatives have been saying: Not only can’t the political class make hard decisions on entitlements, the Democrats are trying to create a new entitlement and hide its cost. And if they succeed, we are in very big trouble.

February 27, 2010 at 1:05 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/426407/you-lie/kathryn-jean-lopez

Most of the time, it has been unclear what exactly the President is talking about when he pushes his health-care revolution.

There have always been multiple proposed bills at any given moment. Now there are multiple passed bills. [The House bill; the Senate bill]

Going into this week’s summit, the White House relied mostly on the Senate bill, which does not prohibit abortion funding.

First of all, Ben Nelson’s faux compromise in the Senate bill allows federally paid-for insurance plans to cover abortions. Second of all, as the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has clearly explained, $7 billion appropriated to Community Health Centers can also be used for abortions. Further still, the health-care legislation currently on the table allows for abortion funding on Indian reservations and leaves out the conscience-clause language that wound up in the final version of the House bill, at least in round one.

The White House ignored an obvious call to invite to the summit Bart Stupak, the pro-life Michigan Democrat who has led the effort to prohibit funding of abortion in health-care legislation. Stupak succeeded in the House, but his language didn’t make it into the Senate version, nor into the latest iteration of the bill.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, at the summit on Thursday, said: “For 30 years, we’ve had a federal law that says that we’re not going to have taxpayer funding of abortions. We have had this debate in the House. It was a very serious debate. . . . The House upheld the language we have had in law for 30 years that there will be no taxpayer funding of abortions. This [Senate] bill that we have before us - and there was no reference to the issue in your outline, Mr. President - begins for the first time in 30 years [to] allow taxpayer funding of abortion.”

* AND BY "ALLOWS" CRITICS MEAN THAT ALL IT WOULD TAKE FOR ABORTION FUNDING TO BE REQUIRED UNDER THE BILL WOULD BE FOR THE [OBAMA] ADMINISTRATION TO MAKE OFFERING ABORTION MANDATORY IN THE SITUATIONS OUTLINED ABOVE.

Speaking to Congress in September, President Obama claimed that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” More than a year into his presidency, that’s simply not the case.

Nancy Pelosi is misleading when she claims the Hyde Amendment — which is subject to annual votes and applies only to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services — makes the abortion debate irrelevant in the health-care debate.

* AGAIN... WITH RESPECT... REFER TO THE ABOVE REFERENCES TO THE SENATE BILL.

* LISTEN... I HAVE NO INTEREST IN STARTING A DISCUSSION ON ABORTION POLICY; MY PURPOSE IN POSTING THIS PARTICULAR NEWSBITE IS SIMPLE TO SEPARATE TRUTH FROM... er... UNTRUTH.

February 27, 2010 at 1:05 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/426405/when-responsibility-doesnt-pay/mark-steyn

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation.

[Back to Greece... the] socialist government [there] has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that.

Public-sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math! And for about seven months’ work: For many of them, the work day ends at 2:30 p.m.

And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments.

In other words: Economic reality is "not my problem." "I want my benefits!" And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

February 27, 2010 at 1:06 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TO REITERATE FROM A PREVIOUS POST, ONLY THIS TIME IN BULLET FORMAT --

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522446

It was [Paul Ryan, the Republican] congressman who made the most pointed remarks about Obama's reform proposal:

"This bill does not control costs (or) reduce deficits. Instead, (it) adds a new health care entitlement when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have."

"The bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending. The true 10-year cost (is) $2.3 trillion."

"The bill takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits."

"The bill takes $72 billion from the CLASS Act (long-term care insurance) benefit premiums and claims them as offsets."

"The bill treats Medicare like a piggy bank, (raiding) half a trillion dollars not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program."

"The chief actuary of Medicare (says) as much as 20% of Medicare providers will either go out of business or have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries."

"Millions of seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage (Medicare through a private insurer) will lose the coverage that they now enjoy."

"When you strip out the double-counting and ... gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit."

"The 'doc fix' (restoring cuts in Medicare reimbursements) costs $371 billion ... a price tag (that) made the score look bad. (So) that provision was taken out, and (put) in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending."

"Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up? If you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we're bending it up. He's claiming that we're going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have."

(*SHRUG*)

* SO FAR NO REBUTTAL FROM EITHER THE PRESIDENT OR THE DEMOCRATS; CERTAINLY NO AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE I'M AWARE OF HS REBUTTED RYAN'S OBSERVATIONS. TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE THE CBO HASN'T CHALLENGED RYAN'S CLAIMS.

February 27, 2010 at 2:34 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522422

President Obama's budget has added more than $100 billion in federal taxpayers' money to what is called "education," so that means it will be spent by alumni of the Saul Alinsky school of radical community organizing and/or the Chicago Democratic machine.

We're indebted to Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com for exposing the shocking use of some of these funds.

* YOU KNOW WHAT, FOLKS... DON'T JUST TAKE SCHLAFLY'S WORD OR GELLER'S WORD... GOOGLE "ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA" AND DO YOUR OWN FACT-CHECKING. THAT'S WHAT I DID PRIOR TO PLACING THIS PARTICULAR OP-ED WITHIN TODAY'S "NEWSBITES." FOLKS... I WOULD NEVER KNOWINGLY STEER YOU WRONG. SCHLAFLY'S "IMPASSIONED RHETORIC" IS INDEED BASED UPON FACT FROM WHAT I CAN GATHER.

Obama is using the public schools to recruit a private army of high-schoolers to "build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda." We now know Obama's "agenda" is to move the U.S. into European-style socialism.

Obama's Internet outreach during his campaign, Obama for America, has been renamed Organizing for America (OFA) in order to recruit students to join a cult of Obama and become activists for his goals.

Geller discovered that the teacher of an 11th-grade government class in Massillon, Ohio, passed out the sign-up sheet, headed with Obama's "O" logo, asking students to become interns for Organizing for America.

These interns will get an intensive nine-week training course using comprehensive lesson plans. Assigned readings include Saul Alinsky's notorious "Rules for Radicals," "Stir It Up: Lessons From Community Organizing and Advocacy" by left-wing activist Rinku Sen, and parts of "Dreams From My Father" dealing with Obama's days as a Chicago community organizer.

Republican students will be filtered out of the intern program by requiring applicants to answer questions that reveal their politics. One example: "What one issue facing our country is important to you and why?"

Geller said the purpose of this training to become Alinsky-style community organizers is, "of course, to elect more Democrats." The program is specifically geared to get the kids working in the 2010 elections. The sign-up sheet states that the "purpose" of training these students is "to build community" among the interns and teach them "to be leaders in OFA's organizing work." After all, Barack Obama knows a great deal about being a community organizer — that was his only real job before he got into politics.

Job prospects may be bleak for many Americans, but they will be rosy for alumni of Obama's intern program. After the students have been fully trained as Alinsky-style community organizers, they will be eligible for jobs in Senior Corps, AmeriCorps or Learn and Serve America.

Those three so-called "service" organizations, which annually dole out millions of dollars to left-wing groups, are overseen by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The U.S. Senate just confirmed this corporation's new chief executive, Patrick Corvington, who was a senior official of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has given over a million and a half dollars to the Acorn network of organizations.

February 28, 2010 at 10:08 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522450

The U.S., which backed Britain to the hilt when Argentina invaded its Falklands in 1982, has suddenly gone neutral on who has sovereignty over the islands. This is much more than a bad slap to our best ally.

Remember April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq who infamously told Saddam Hussein in 1990: "But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." To Saddam, that was a green light from the U.S. to invade his tiny neighbor.

Today, we hear similar language from the U.S. on another territorial dispute that may take us down the same road.

Asked last Wednesday about Argentina's new claims on the Falklands, the U.K. territories it tried to seize in 1982, a State Department spokesman said: "Our position remains one of neutrality. The U.S. recognizes de facto U.K. administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party."

That's quite a statement, given that the United Kingdom is America's strongest ally and that Argentina is a weak state aligned with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

By curiously declaring a passive neutrality on the Falklands, the U.S. opens the door to all sorts of destabilization efforts. China and Russia have no doubt taken notice with our new stance as they eye Taiwan and remnants of the old Soviet empire.

For now, Argentina says it has no military ambitions in the Falklands. It says it intends to resolve its desire to reclaim them through the United Nations, tying up Britain that way.

But it's also seizing international supply ships heading into the Falklands over permit technicalities to disrupt sea lanes. On Thursday, the British navy intercepted an Argentine warship in Falkland waters, an incident it now calls inadvertent.

This doesn't bode well even if Argentina isn't much of a naval power. America's declaration of neutrality is one less obstacle keeping it from moving full speed ahead.

As for the British, they are understandably aghast at our new position and wonder what the "special relationship" between the two countries now means.

Since World War II, the United States has honored the territorial integrity of nations as they stand.

Now the message is that any territory is up for grabs, with no state's claim any better than any other's, ally or not.

February 28, 2010 at 10:09 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522448

While Americans were distracted by the noisy health care debate, congressional Democrats tried to pass a bill that would have decimated our intelligence capability. We're all lucky they failed.

Thanks to the vigilance of a couple of bloggers and House Republicans — Rep. Peter Hoekstra, in particular — the $50 billion intelligence authorization bill was stripped of a last-minute amendment that would have made criminals of many U.S. intelligence agents.

Specifically, the Democratic amendment sought to impose prison time and huge fines on CIA and other intelligence operatives who treated their captives in a "cruel, inhuman and degrading way."

Sounds very high-minded. But of course, "cruel, inhuman and degrading" are in the eye of the beholder.

Among the transgressions the bill would have outlawed were "exploiting the phobias of the individual," "depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care," or even "cramped confinement" or "prolonged isolation."

These are so vague as to be meaningless. A lawyered-up terrorist suspect, working through one of Attorney General Eric Holder's lenient civil courts, could have a field day with this new law.

Think about it: Virtually any agent who in the line of duty did anything to anyone — ranging from shaking a suspect to handcuffing someone in an uncomfortable position to even keeping the air conditioner too low during a terrorist's interrogation — could serve hard time for the crime.

And yes, we do mean hard time. The minimum prison sentence under the bill was 15 years. Imagine spending a quarter of your adult life behind bars because you shoved some terrorist dirtbag a bit too hard into a CIA paddy wagon.

The real outrage is that no one even knew this was in the bill. It was slipped in at the last moment by Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott, obviously with the connivance of the Democratic leadership and Intelligence Committee Chairman Sylvester Reyes.

Several bloggers and writers, in particular Andrew McCarthy at the National Review Online and Byron York at the Examiner, kicked up a fuss.

"The bill had no review in the intelligence committee, and the CIA was given no opportunity to examine the legislation or present its views," noted Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter and author of "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack."

Once alerted, Hoekstra and other Republicans moved fast to kill the provision. That it was removed so quickly by the Democrats with very little fuss indicates that they knew they were trying to pull a fast one on the American people, and got caught.

It says a lot about the state of national security today — but even more about the party that now controls Congress.

February 28, 2010 at 10:09 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704625004575089493357533542.html

New York's budget deficit is an estimated $8.2 billion, due in no small part to state spending that has risen by nearly 70%, or $35 billion, over the past decade. The recent financial crisis has exposed the state's overreliance on tax revenue from Wall Street.

This mess is all part of the culture of Albany, arguably the most corrupt legislature on Earth. Last June, the state government was paralyzed for more than a month when Democratic Senators Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate joined the Republican caucus, making it unclear which party was in control. Eventually, both men returned to the Democratic side of the aisle.

Mr. Espada would later be investigated for not living in his district and funneling state money to health clinics that he operates. Mr. Monserrate was later convicted of assaulting his girlfriend.

Democrat Charles Rangel of Manhattan was admonished yesterday by the House ethics committee for taking junkets to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008 that his staff knew were financed by corporations. The committee said staff aides tried to tell him three times about the corporate sponsors.

Mr. Rangel is also being probed for his use of multiple rent-stabilized apartments, for failing to pay taxes on rental income from a property he owns in the Dominican Republic, and for belatedly reporting half a million dollars in personal assets on his official House disclosure forms.

He has refused to step down as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and has had the full support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Mr. Rangel is also being probed for his use of multiple rent-stabilized apartments, for failing to pay taxes on rental income from a property he owns in the Dominican Republic, and for belatedly reporting half a million dollars in personal assets on his official House disclosure forms.

He has refused to step down as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and has had the full support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was admonished by the House in 2004, Mrs. Pelosi had demanded that he resign as GOP leader.

February 28, 2010 at 10:10 AM
William R. Barker said...

* PART 1 of 2...

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/due-north-canadas-marvelous-mortgage-and-banking-system

What about the Canadian banking system allowed it to survive the recent worldwide slowdown without a single bank failure?

Almost all Canadian mortgages are “full recourse” loans, meaning that the borrower remains fully responsible for the mortgage even in the case of foreclosure. If a bank in Canada forecloses on a home with negative equity, it can file a deficiency judgment against the borrower, which allows it to attach the borrower’s other assets and even take legal action to garnish the borrower’s future wages. In the United States, we have a mix of recourse and non-recourse laws that vary by state, but even in recourse states, the use of deficiency judgments to attach assets and garnish wages is infrequent. The full recourse feature of Canadian mortgages results in more responsible borrowing, fewer delinquencies, and significantly fewer foreclosures than in the United States.

Canadian mortgages carry a fixed interest rate for a maximum of five years, and rates are then re-negotiated for the next five years, similar to a five-year adjustable rate.

About half of Canadian mortgages carry mortgage insurance (compared to 30 percent in the U.S. currently and only 15 percent before the crisis), primarily for those mortgages financing the purchase of a home with less than a 20 percent down payment, and the borrower is required to pay the full mortgage insurance premium upfront. Another difference from the U.S. is that when private insurance companies in Canada insure mortgages, they have the authority to approve or reject the property appraisal, and they have strong financial incentives to only approve realistic property appraisals. Mortgage insurance in Canada covers the full loan amount for the full life of the mortgage, and cannot be eliminated like in the United States when the property value exceeds the mortgage balance. The traditionally much higher frequency of mortgage insurance in Canada compared to the United States helps to stabilize Canada’s mortgage and housing markets, and is one of the many features that contribute to its ranking as the safest banking system in the world.

Home mortgage interest has never been tax-deductible in Canada, so there is no tax advantage to home ownership in Canada over renting. There is also no tax benefit to converting home equity into household debt in Canada, which has resulted in a much greater equity accumulation in Canada (70 percent of total real estate value) than in the United States (currently only about 45 percent). Also, paying down your mortgage in Canada is a tax-free investment and further encourages greater equity accumulation than in the United States. Interestingly, even without any tax advantage for home ownership, the Canadian homeownership rate (69 percent) is actually higher than in the United States (67.2 percent).

* To be continued...

February 28, 2010 at 12:38 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)

Prepaying mortgages in Canada is allowed, but there are much stiffer prepayment penalties (three months of mortgage interest) than in the United States, which discourages the kind of refinancing that frequently took place in the United States leading up to the housing meltdown, and often involved pulling home equity out in the refinancing process (encouraged by the tax deductibility of mortgage interest).

To promote affordable housing for low-income households, the Canadian government has not used public policies like the Community Reinvestment Act in the United States, which encouraged homeownership for lower-income and less creditworthy borrowers, financed frequently with subprime mortgages. Instead, the Canadian government provides public funding for low-income rental housing, rather than encouraging homeownership for low-income households, and Canada has thus avoided the American mistake of using misguided policies to turn good, low-income renters into bad homeowners.

Compared to the United States, the Canadian banking system is much more concentrated, with the five largest Canadian banks (out of only 82 in the entire country, compared to more than 8,000 banks in the United States) holding more than 80 percent of total bank assets. This concentration became an advantage during the recent financial crisis because it facilitated critical discussions among the five large banks and the single federal regulator (the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions). Also, Canada has never had branching restrictions like the U.S. laws that prevented interstate banking up until 1994, and this has historically allowed Canadian banks to achieve geographical diversification for their deposits and loans portfolios. It was largely this difference in geographical diversification that help explains why the United States had 9,000 bank failures during the Great Depression (each operating within only one of the 48 states, due to the prohibition on interstate branching) and not a single Canadian bank (all with branches nationwide) failed in the 1930s.

There is a much lower rate of loan originations by mortgage brokers in Canada (only 35 percent) than in the U.S. (70 percent), far less mortgage securitization in Canada than here, and a much smaller subprime mortgage market. Banks in Canada keep and service 68 percent of the mortgages on their own balance sheets that they originate and underwrite, which encourages prudent lending since banks are putting much of their own capital at risk. Finally, almost all mortgage payments in Canada are made electronically by an automatic payment arrangement, which minimizes late payments.

Taken together, the features and regulations of banks in Canada outlined above create a healthy and sound “pro-lender” environment absent of political motivations for outcomes like greater homeownership, compared to the often politically motivated “pro-borrower” and “pro-homeowner” policies of the United States.

While Canada’s banking system has promoted responsible borrowing and prudent lending and underwriting practices with little politically motivated interference, the U.S. banking system seems to have encouraged excessive lending to risky borrowers because of the political obsession with homeownership.

Canada’s banks are generally ranked as the safest and soundest in the world, and their non-politicized banking system could provide a model for banking reform in the United States. Moving towards the Canadian banking system could go a long way towards stabilizing our mortgage, credit, and housing markets and make us less vulnerable to financial shocks in the future.

February 28, 2010 at 12:38 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/the-mother-of-all-bailouts-to-come-85760442.html

Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., are working on bipartisan legislation to revamp the regulatory structure of the financial services industry. The House passed Rep. Barney Frank's version Dec. 11. The bill from Frank, D-Mass., would create a controversial Consumer Financial Protection Agency and codify a permanent bailout authority for the federal government.

The big question for Americans who hate bailouts is whether the Senate will follow the House's lead and grant the Federal Reserve the statutory authority to bail out individuals, partnerships or corporations to the tune of $4 trillion.

On Page 506 of the House-passed bill, which is titled the "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act" is the following language: The amounts made available under this subsection shall not exceed $4,000,000,000,000.

This so-called "reform" and "consumer protection" legislation authorizes a $4 trillion bailout fund for Wall Street. That is more money than President Obama's 2011 budget ($3.8 trillion), the gross domestic product of Germany ($3.7 trillion), and between five and six times the amount of the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

A majority of House members actually voted for a bill containing $4 trillion in new bailout authority. You just can't make this stuff up. It is really in the bill.

February 28, 2010 at 12:39 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7332803/A-perfect-storm-is-brewing-for-the-IPCC.html

The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document.

OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse...

(*SNORT*)

Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists.

Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate.

As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion.

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars.

February 28, 2010 at 12:39 PM

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