How the Homeownership Dream Went Sour
In part one of a three-part series, Rick Perlstein exposes how the federal government's ideologically-motivated project to promote homeownership in America has become badly derailed.
"Most years, President Bush has celebrated June - National Homeownership Month - with a splashy speech. Not this year. This year, he stayed as far from the topic as he could get... What went wrong?
First, a demonstration of the sheer size of the political bet the Republicans placed on exhorting as many Americans as possible to own their own homes. Exhibit A: the March, 2005 special issue on the 'Ownership Society' of the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, of the conservative movement's flagship think tanks. There are, lead author James Glassman wrote, three aims of Bush's dreamed-of Owernship Society: to 'reform' Social Security, to 'boost the economy by cutting taxes on dividends,' and 'to make home buying easier.'
The only author to raise any sort of caveat - that home prices are skyrocketing out of control - is the neoconservative geographer Joel Kotkin. He blamed, you guessed it, liberals: 'Environmental regulations and other growth-constraining factors have inflated housing prices.'
As we'll see in the next post, that's absurd."
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Home Ownership -
Someone ought to present the President a copy of the 2007 'State of the Nation's Housing Report' from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.
He should read the list of the 17 organizations which helped fund the report.
That would require of him only to turn to the inside cover.
Of course Bush probably think the Center espouses a liberal point of view. It is under the John Kennedy School of Government.
If he'll just go one more page, page 1 of the Executive Summary.
Underline, and read to him, the last phrases from page 1, paragraph 3 of the Executive Summary, regarding the incomes of the lower quartile of American households.
"that....economic growth dramatically lifts
the real incomes and wealth of the bottom quarter of households."
wgaboy
ps now I'll read the article.