Let’s revisit this piece of financial history, before Hillary rewrites it.
By Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore– Larry Kudlow is a contributing editor ofNational Review. Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.— May 28, 2016
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Under his HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It’s a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and all the great investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, which helps account for his amazing business success.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard-working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”
So she’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman — something she would know almost nothing about because she’s never actually run a business (though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle-futures market).
Hillary’s new TV ads say Trump predicted the real-estate crash in 2006 (good call) and then bought real estate at low prices when the housing crash that few others foresaw arrived in 2008. Many builders went out of business during the crash, but Trump read the market perfectly.
What is so hypocritical about this Clinton attack is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits. Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let’s look at the many ways the Clintons and their cronies contributed to the housing implosion and Great Recession.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton on May 7 in Los Angeles.PHOTO:ZUMA PRESS
In his 1992 campaignBill Clintonliked to tell voters they’d be getting two for the price of one, and nowHillary Clintonis dusting off the same promise. She said this weekend in Kentucky that she’d put the First Husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy,” and she’s since added that “he’s got to come out of retirement” to raise incomes and put people back to work.
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks are a revealing turn, not least because so far she’s been running for PresidentObama’s third term. But since Democrats seem to agree that the economic status quo is dismal, and thus they can’t run on Mr. Obama’s record, the presumptive nominee is trying to confuse voters with halcyon memories of the 1990s boom.
The Clinton gang has since “clarified” that Mr. Clinton’s ministrations will be confined to distressed U.S. regions like inner cities or coal country. Maybe they realized that vowing to outsource one of her most important jobs might diminish her as a candidate.
Her larger problem is that the Obama-era Democratic Party has repudiated the Democratic Party’s Bill-era centrist agenda. They now call themselves progressives, not New Democrats, and they take their marching orders fromBernie SandersandElizabeth Warren,notLarry SummersandAlan Greenspan.Mrs. Clinton has accommodated this trend to the pre-Bill left.
Hillary Clinton sounds like Paul Ryan on the economy. She says she’s for “strong growth, fair growth, and long-term growth.” She would abandon the slow-growth economics of President Obama and return us to those wonderful days in the 1990s when husband Bill was in charge. This is a different Hillary Clinton from the one we’ve seen in debates with Bernie Sanders, her socialist rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s the centrist-at-heart Clinton whom conservatives and Republicans eager for an acceptable alternative to Donald Trump can vote for.
Only there’s a problem: This Hillary Clinton is entirely mythical. She doesn’t exist. As the Democratic party has lurched to the left, she has lurched with it. While talking up growth, she has proposed no incentives to produce it. She relies on government spending to stir growth, Obama’s woeful policy. On tax cuts, she’s for boosting the top rate on individual income to 45 percent, the highest in three decades. Under her complicated plan, the tax rate on capital gains would jump from 23.8 percent to 39.6 percent, then to 47.4 percent with surtaxes. The Tax Foundation concluded her tax hikes would cut annual growth by 1 percent and shrink incomes by at least 0.9 percent. That’s a recipe for less job creation, more wage stagnation, fewer business startups, and a despondent country.
GOP bills would block new monuments on public land
BY MATTHEW DALY – Associated Press
Published in: National
1996 AP FILE PHOTO
Vice President Al Gore applauds after President Bill Clinton signs a bill designating 1.7 million acres in southern Utah as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
WASHINGTON Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush have designated public land as national monuments, using a federal law to protect from development sites judged to have natural, historical or scientific significance.
Now some House Republicans, saying the 105-year-old law has been misused, have introduced bills to limit or block the president’s ability to make such designations without approval from Congress.
GOP Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana compared the 1906 Antiquities Act to the mythical sword of Damocles, calling it a weapon that can be used against rural communities at any time without warning.
Residents of Montana and other Western states “must cope with the constant knowledge that, one day, we could wake up to find that with the stroke of a pen, the president declared their backyard a national monument,” Rehberg said Tuesday.
For many living in the West, “it’s no myth,” Rehberg said, citing a 2001 designation by then-President Bill Clinton creating the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana and Clinton’s 1996 designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
Rehberg, who is running for U.S. Senate against Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., sponsored one of six GOP bills to overturn or limit the Antiquities Act.
The bills respond to outrage expressed throughout the West last year after an internal Interior Department memo was made public. The memo listed 14 sites in nine states that could be designated as national monuments. The plan was never formally proposed, but opponents said its existence showed the need to reform the law.
“This isn’t about preventing future monument designations. It’s about making sure those designations aren’t forced on people who frankly don’t want or need them,” Rehberg said. (more…)
The Vetoes of Rick Perry As Texas governor, he broke records and earned conservative support.
In Texas, they called it the “Father’s Day Massacre.”
In June 2001, fresh off his first legislative session as governor, Rick Perry vetoed 79 bills on the last day of his veto period — the time in which a governor can sign bills, veto them, or allow them to become law without his signature. Added to the three bills he had vetoed prior, Perry’s annihilation shattered the record for a Texas governor. (Perry easily knocked off Republican Bill Clements, who had axed 59 bills in 1989, from his first-place perch.) It was also a marked change from George W. Bush’s governing style: Bush had never vetoed more than 37 bills in a year.
The dramatic gesture paid off.
The Austin American-Statesman analyzed over 500 e-mails and letters that were sent to Perry’s office in the aftermath of the vetoes, and found the response overwhelmingly positive. Perry, the American-Statesman reported, “appears to have energized people who support the death penalty, oppose abortion, are wary of more government — and whose turnout at the polls is necessary for him to win a full term in the 2002 election.” Winning the trust of conservatives was important for Perry. Before the vetoes, he had signed a hate-crimes bill that was opposed by many conservatives — his office was inundated with calls the days before the bill hit his desk — and was the Democrats’ “top priority” that session, according to Texas political analyst William Lutz.
But if the vetoes soothed conservative voters’ concerns about Perry, they carried other political liabilities. He angered state doctors when he killed a bill that would have forced insurers to pay doctors more promptly. Another controversial piece of legislation he vetoed was one that would have prohibited the execution of mentally retarded criminals. (more…)
