Sunday, April 13, 2008

McCain on Mortgages

As I've been crowing for months, once you look behind the rhetoric, McCain's economic policies are not all that different from his 2 Democratic opponents. From the LA Times:
Amid widespread concerns about the nation's mortgage crisis, John McCain outlinedThursday a proposal to help "well-meaning, deserving homeowners who arefacing foreclosure" and called for a Justice Department investigation into possible"criminal wrongdoing" by unscrupulous lenders.

McCain's aides said his home mortgage plan could help 200,000 to 400,000 peopleand cost $3 billion to $10 billion. That would be far less than the proposalsoffered by Clinton and Obama, but McCain aides said it would be biggerthan the efforts envisioned by the Bush administration.

The plan would retire old loans that homeowners no longer can pay and replace the with less expensive, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages that are federally guaranteed.McCain said families would gain "the opportunity to trade a burdensomemortgage for a manageable loan that reflects the market value of their home."
Are there any free-marketers in the house? This is just pandering. And while I expect it from the Democrats, who have built careers on the economic ignorance and protectionist tendencies of their political base, Republicans, in theory, should take the high (and factully accurate) road on the issue. Why doesn't McCain just give us some his famous "straight talk" -- such as why there was no need to bailout and subsidize the American "tech-sector" after the dot-com bubble burst in the late 90's (a segment of the economy that is doing just fine right now without the benevolent saving grace of federal intervention) -- but I know the answer...