Despite stubbornly high inflation and record-high credit card debt, the economy added 2.7 million jobs last year while unemployment hovered just below 4%. But not all states did as well. California, the gem of Democratic uniparty governance, added just 154,000 jobs, and joblessness stagnated above 5%.
While states such as Florida and Texas grew their workforce by 3.4% and 3.3%, respectively, California’s grew by just 0.87%. All this was while the state budget deficit ballooned to a record $73 billion as revenues from personal income tax collection dropped by 25%.
Why is California’s economy sputtering while the rest of the nation moves ahead?
The simplest answer is that California’s population is shrinking. After more than 100 years of steady growth, California is exporting more people than it is importing. The state continues to have golden sunshine, natural beauty, and warm winters, but bad policy decisions by Democratic politicians who run the state mean people simply don’t want to live there anymore.
The biggest reason people are leaving is the cost of housing. On the coast where the best jobs are, California has some of the most expensive housing in the nation. To afford a median-priced home in San Francisco, a household needs to make $400,000 a year. Actual households in San Francisco make just one-third of that: $136,000.
California’s housing crisis is due to excessive environmental regulation, which makes it impossible to build new homes. While California built just fewer than 120,000 new homes in 2020, Texas built more than 260,000.
BILL WHITTLE VIDEOS – DEBATING HILLARYPublished on Oct 3, 2016 Part 1In Part 1 of this 6 part series, Firewall host Bill Whittle responds to the ECONOMIC issues left untouched in the first presidential debate.
Published on Oct 3, 2016 Part 2In Part 2 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle flips Hillary’s claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by tax cuts for the wealthy, and explains who the REAL villains are
Published on Oct 4, 2016 Part 3During the debate, Mrs. Clinton returned to the same line we’ve been fed for eight years: there’s an economic boom waiting in the Green Economy. No, there isn’t. In Part 3 of this 6 part series, Bill takes apart Hillary’s energy plans and examines the consequences to the planet.
Published on Oct 5, 2016 – Part 4Surely there was no greater missed opportunity in the first debate than listening to HILLARY CLINTON talk about how “concerned” she is about the security of classified government information.Bill Whittle rushes in where CNN fears to tread.
Published on Oct 6, 2016 Part 5Hillary Clinton says she has a “plan” to “really squeeze ISIS in Syria.” It seems like Syria might be squeezed enough already. In Part 5 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle lays out the historical facts that show that Clinton and Obama CREATED ISIS.
Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?Let’s revisit this piece of financial history, before Hillary rewrites it.
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.
http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/
NEW YORK POST
Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.OBAMA IS PRESIDING OVER THE LARGEST CONSOLIDATION OF PERSONAL DATA IN US HISTORY.Housing database (more…)
Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)
Mortgage Madness
Blame for the 2008 financial collapse is, and should be, widespread.
Jay Cost
June 1, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 36
In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. . . . He who determines what politics is about runs the country.” Schattschneider calls the organized effort to ensure that some alternatives remain illegitimate “the mobilization of bias.”
Peter J. Wallison must be quite familiar with this idea. A longtime critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) tasked with injecting liquidity into the secondary mortgage market, he has offered warnings about these agencies that have fallen on deaf ears for over a decade. When he and Edward Pinto, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly pointed out that Fannie and Freddie were loaded up with the subprime mortgages that contributed to the financial collapse of 2008, and that maybe—just maybe—this had something to do with the mess, they were greeted with accusations of Hitlerism. “The Big Lie” is what Joe Nocera of the New York Times accused Wallison and Pinto of propagating.
There are some ideas that simply cannot gain mainstream acceptance because they challenge essential priorities of the ruling elite. Accordingly, any connection drawn from Fannie and Freddie to the financial collapse must be squashed, because distributing federally subsidized credit to low- and middle-income (LMI) borrowers has been a backbone of the nation’s housing policy for nearly 20 years. All of this makes Wallison’s work intriguing to anybody inclined to question the status quo—even more so because he has written this excellent book in defense of his thesis. (more…)
Peter J. Wallison
American Enterprise Institute
PETER J. WALLISON holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and in New York. He also served as White House Counsel in the Reagan Administration. A graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Wallison received his law degree from Harvard Law School and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He is the editor, co-editor, author, or co-author of numerous books, including Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on November 5, 2013, during a conference entitled “Dodd-Frank: A Law Like No Other,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig Von Mises Lecture Series.
The 2008 financial crisis was a major event, equivalent in its initial scope—if not its duration—to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time, many commentators said that we were witnessing a crisis of capitalism, proof that the free market system was inherently unstable. Government officials who participated in efforts to mitigate its effects claim that their actions prevented a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system, an idea that has found acceptance among academic and other observers, particularly the media. These views culminated in the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act that is founded on the notion that the financial system is inherently unstable and must be controlled by government regulation.
We will never know, of course, what would have happened if these emergency actions had not been taken, but it is possible to gain an understanding of why they were considered necessary—that is, the causes of the crisis.
Why is it important at this point to examine the causes of the crisis? After all, it was five years ago, and Congress and financial regulators have acted, or are acting, to prevent a recurrence. Even if we can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the crisis, some will argue that the new regulations now being put in place under Dodd-Frank will make a repetition unlikely. Perhaps. But these new regulations have almost certainly slowed economic growth and the recovery from the post-crisis recession, and they will continue to do so in the future. If regulations this pervasive were really necessary to prevent a recurrence of the financial crisis, then we might be facing a legitimate trade-off in which we are obliged to sacrifice economic freedom and growth for the sake of financial stability. But if the crisis did not stem from a lack of regulation, we have needlessly restricted what most Americans want for themselves and their children.
It is not at all clear that what happened in 2008 was the result of insufficient regulation or an economic system that is inherently unstable. On the contrary, there is compelling evidence that the financial crisis was the result of the government’s own housing policies. These in turn, as we will see, were based on an idea—still popular on the political left—that underwriting standards in housing finance are discriminatory and unnecessary. In today’s vernacular, it’s called “opening the credit box.” These policies, as I will describe them, were what caused the insolvency of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and ultimately the financial crisis. They are driven ideologically by the left, but the political muscle in Washington is supplied by what we should call the Government Mortgage Complex—the realtors, the homebuilders, and the banks—for whom freely available government-backed mortgage money is a source of great profit.
The Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, established in 1934, was authorized to insure mortgages up to 100 percent, but it required a 20 percent down payment and operated with very few delinquencies for 25 years. However, in the serious recession of 1957, Congress loosened these standards to stimulate the growth of housing, moving down payments to three percent between 1957 and 1961. Predictably, this resulted in a boom in FHA insured mortgages and a bust in the late ’60s. The pattern keeps recurring, and no one seems to remember the earlier mistakes. We loosen mortgage standards, there’s a bubble, and then there’s a crash. Other than the taxpayers, who have to cover the government’s losses, most of the people who are hurt are those who bought in the bubble years, and found—when the bubble deflated—that they couldn’t afford their homes. (more…)
