So much for resolutions...

Of course I haven't posted in a while now. It seems that "real life" continues to intervene! For today, I have a piece that I wrote in response to a forum thread. The conversation shifted to various economic responses to various tax cuts and government spending.

The first gem was the reminder that the "Clinton Surplus" was created by a Republican Congress and finally passed after Clinton stonewalled it so hard that the entire government shut down for several weeks. In this post, I went into the reasons behind the recent economic problems and their results.

This is what happened in 2006:

Shortly after the Democrats swept Congress, there was a bursting of a gas bubble. Not a physical bubble, but an economic one. Refinery problems plus Middle East concerns plus an increased integration of ethanol worked together to bring gas prices up. Food prices followed quickly. Whenever gas prices go up, food prices go up, because grocery stores work on a shoestring budget. They make almost no profit. So when it costs more to transport food to the store, the items cost more.

Now in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed by a Democrat majority Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA had good intentions... to end the practice of redlining, or refusing to sell homes in certain areas to minorities. However, it basically involved sending the government into real estate to enact something very much like Affirmative Action. It didn't impact us much, though, for nearly 20 years, because it didn't have much teeth.

That changed under President Clinton, who empowered Reno to set things into motion that would punish banks that didn't make enough loans to minorities who wanted to buy homes. The only problem was that the reason why fewer minorities were buying homes was because fewer minorities had the financial means and acumen to hold down a mortgage. The banks were ordered to make it work somehow, and the bank response was the Subprime Mortgage.

The Subprime Mortgage, like the Saltbox and the SUV, was something created by private industry trying to keep what they wanted/needed while skirting Federal regulations. In all three cases, you ended up with something that didn't have all of the advantages of what the government wanted to force or what the private groups originally used. (The SUV is a replacement for the Station Wagon that not only fails to meet sedan fuel economy, but it fails to approach station wagon fuel economy as well. The Saltbox has a partial upper story with a roof that drops to the first story on one side, resulting in a loss of useable space.)

These subprime loans were snapped up by people for whom they were and were not originally intended, creating a heavy demand for new and expensive housing. People who would have been steered towards a starter home were using subprimes to afford twice the house they would have purchased otherwise. We had a housing bubble. W Bush sounded the alarm multiple times, but Frank and Dodd staunchly refused to look into it. All of these subprime home owners were barely managing to make their finances work, and the slightest rise in any of their other bills would lead to disaster.

Then, of course, as mentioned above, the oil price went up. That started a comprehensive collapse that ended in failing banks, foreclosures/abandonments, and rampant unemployment in the construction industry. Unfortunately, instead of isolating this disaster and allowing it to burn itself out, Obama decided to ramp up federal spending, and now it's affecting private sectors that had nothing to do whatsoever with construction or mortgages.

And now the fix, being basically the "You still have to provide mortgages for minorities whether they can afford them or not, but you can't do it this way", is making it nigh impossible for smaller businesses to operate through lack of liquidity. The government we-can't-allow-banks-to-fail mindset has brought to a full stop the natural process of stronger banks buying weaker ones and fixing the problems naturally. Did you know that, at the beginning of the recession, if you had been saving up a little money during the good times, you could have any home renovation done well on the cheap? Before Obama intervened in hopes of getting people to refinance their mortgages, refinancing was easy and very useful. We did it ourselves. Now it's all but impossible unless you fit the narrow and confusing government standards.

Gas prices also started to fall as demand fell, but now the weak dollar plus inflation (both the result of government spending) kept prices up and are now primarily responsible for the current spike. Of course, every part of this, from an end to free checking (next month, I believe, part of Obamacare) to the 50-100% rise in basic food prices, to the tightening of loans and resulting unemployment, is impacting primarily the poor and the middle class.

In short, the particular Democrats who swept Congress in 2006 (aside from Dodd/Frank and other members of the Old Guard) really were no more responsible for the beginning of the recession than W Bush was for the tech bubble burst and 9/11. It's what they've done with it since that has landed us in the Pit of Despair.

Responsibility for education

In Florida, a State Representative has proposed increasing parental involvement in childhood education by having public school teachers grade the parents. Of course, there are many angles in describing the problems with this proposal. A friend of mine who is a Florida-certified to teach and knows the local public schools told me that the parents should be the ones grading the teachers.

On the plus side, the proposal does address a problem that is very real in today's society. Too many parents don't have enough involvement in their children's education. The question in my mind is, will this proposal solve or worsen the problem? I believe that it is a treatment of a symptom rather than the ending of a societal disease.

In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, young Scout does not take easily to school. Her teacher is appalled when she discovers that Scout knows not only how to read, but how to write cursive. Her father has spent so much time reading with her in the evenings, and her housekeeper copied out words for her to practice when she wanted something to do. The teacher is adamant that this is wrong.

"Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage-"                                                               
"Ma'am?"                                                                 
 "Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now."

This book was published in 1960 and referred to the rise of new teaching methods including the much-lampooned "New Math" in public school systems. The adjoining message, naturally, was that these methods would be compromised if all these parents kept thinking that they could do the job of teaching their children how to learn. The movement coincided with the Feminist Movement, which championed pushing mothers, against their will if necessary, to leave their child-rearing and climb the career ladder.

Combine these two together and you have, nurtured for about 50 years by the Liberal Left, the belief that it is the job of parents to work outside the home while leaving the matter of their children's education in the hands of government officials and "properly-trained" instructors. I note that one of the biggest questions I hear as a homeschooling mother is, "How do you know that you're qualified to teach your child?" Before the '60's and its various revolutions, such a question would have been downright laughable. Who is better qualified to teach a child than the people whose genetics created him or her?

Of course, as with many such reforms, we are now discovering that parental involvement does in fact have a strongly positive effect on a child's education. What is the solution? Although Representative Stargel is listed as a Republican, she offers the very liberal proposal that the Government, having discouraged parents from involvement, must now mandate parental involvement for the exact same reason... the good of the children. This is worse than the purported ambulance-in-the-valley solution for the lack of fence on the dangerous cliff. This is tantamount to removing an already-present fence on the cliff before instituting the ambulance in the valley.