Contrary to what liberals want you to think....

It's not all George Bush's fault. The current economic crisis, I mean.

(I can't believe I'm actually blogging about the economy.)

I had to search high and low to find a reference to this, and to find one that explained it in a way that even this ignorant Southerner can understand it. I alluded to it in my last post, but I didn't know the name of the act, and not surprisingly, I haven't heard it mentioned on the news at all. I've known about this for a while, and was a little surprised tonight to find out that my husband, who usually stays caught up, was not aware that there was an act passed regarding this. So I thought I'd post it here, to make sure that the thousands hundreds....okay, eight people who read my blog are aware of it, too.

From Kurt Schulzke at ipercieve.net:

1. In 1977, Democrat President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This act forced banks to “provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to under-served populations”.

2. In 1993, Democrat Bill Clinton asked his Treasury Secretary to come up with reforms to increase the expand the CRA.

3. In 1997, Democrat Bill Clinton increased the market share of these CRA loans from almost zero to almost 15%. Fannie’s and Freddie’s combined portfolios went from about $200 billion to over $1 trillion during Clinton’s term in office - a five fold increase.

4. In 2005, Bush attempted to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (GSEs) but he was rejected along party lines despite warnings by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.


How did Clinton seek to enforce compliance? In 1993, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen explains:

“In a nutshell, what we’re proposing to do is to make it easier for lenders to show how they’re complying with the Community Reinvestment Act. …the changes we’re proposing are important because banks now have a very clear, quantitative standard by which their compliance can be judged. And that is very important to banks when it comes to ask regulators to approve mergers, new branches and the like.”

Under Bill Clinton and his Democratic Congress, the CRA was reborn and inserted into the very fabric of our financial markets. Yes, some institutions were happy to make money doing CRA loans but they would not have made them if the Clinton Administration hadn’t forced them to in order to get new branches and mergers approved. We know this because before Clinton, CRA loans were almost non-existent.

So, the bleeding heart liberals made sure that no one was "discriminated" against by not being granted a loan. We've been lending to people who couldn't pay it back, and there was never any reason to think they could. But it wouldn't have been fair not to do the same for them as we were for people who were in a position to pay, right? After all, shouldn't everyone have a house?

Yet Nancy Pelosi can stand there and place all the blame on George Bush and his failed economic policies.