Orson Scott Card and the Housing Crisis

Orson Scott Card is best known for his ground-breaking Ender's Game sci-fi series, but he also writes opinion columns. I fairly cheered when I read his column on the housing crisis, because he was saying exactly what I had thought about it.

Don't blame the Republicans. Not entirely.

It was the Democrats, with Bill Clinton, that softened loan regulations, that fined or penalized loan institutions for not giving out loans, even to the poor. (Jimmy Carter actually started that ball rolling.)

And, yet, this particular bit of legislation does not get a light shone upon it by most media organizations. Yes, I blame the Republican Party to some extent because some of the actions they took worsened the problems, but it isn't fair to see that no Democrats were mentioned by most mainstream news organizations when the finger pointing begins. They should take at least some of the blame for this. Or do we ignore the fact that they run and have run Congress during this crisis?

De-regulation and requiring institutions to loan to folks that might not be able to pay back the loan based on their income, lead the lenders to screw with the numbers. Prices went up and up while APR on home loans stayed low and they encouraged homeowners to borrow against the value of their home before the loan was even paid off. The lenders were just scrambling to meet these requirements while making a profit. Once they figured out HOW big of a profit they could make, they started rolling out home loans like crazy.

Once the market naturally started to even out, they could no longer rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, and the real, ugly problem came to the fore--- the people they had lent the money to could not actually pay off a loan that size.

Card places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats:

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Card is actually a registered Democrat, and yet he takes journalists to task for ignoring anything negative about Democrats. He writes a well ordered argument and he doesn't sound like a conservative that just stepped off the crazy train. He's a Democrat with integrity. Read the article in its entirety here. http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html