Ground Hog Day

excerpted from "Knowing More and More About Less and Less"

by Lawrence Alexander on HuffPo

The country is now in a financial crisis that, in terms of the number of housing foreclosures, has not been seen since the Great Depression. Do a search on the internet for mortgage foreclosures and what do you get? The first ten of an estimated one million results, including the helpful information that the Minnehaha County sheriff holds mortgage foreclosure sales every Wednesday at eleven a.m. Narrow the search to government response and the list falls to a more manageable, but still impossible, 187,000. But you already knew that mortgage foreclosures were a major problem during the Depression, and you wonder what government did about it then. You type in 'New Deal' after 'government response,' and the number goes down to a mere 105,000 sources you might want to consider.

If we did not have to find our way through this mind-numbing thicket, if we could still ask someone like that student clerk at Borders where we ought to start, we could actually learn something that might bring some clarity to the present confusion and help us decide what to do. In 1932, according to the author of The Coming of the New Deal, more than a quarter millions families lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures; this at a time when the population of the United States was not much more than a third of what it is today. The first response of government, Herbert Hoover's Home Loan Bank Act of 1932, like Republican proposals to meet the current crisis, offered financial incentives to lenders. This did nothing to cure the problem. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the November election, the rate of foreclosures had risen to almost a thousand a day.

What did Roosevelt do? In his famous first hundred days, he created a new agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which bought mortgages from the lenders who could no longer carry them, financed payment for taxes and repairs, and "rewrote the mortgages to provide for easy repayment over a long term and at relatively low interest rates." One out of every five mortgaged homes in America benefited from this program. The real estate market was saved from collapse and banks, instead of failing, once again began to lend money to people who wanted to have a home of their own.

Get the rest after the click ...

My comment:

Of course, Roosevelt was a Socialist. We know that's the case because we've been told he was a Socialist. We know Socialism is bad. We know that's true because we've been told Socialism is bad. We're Conservatives. We believe everything we're told. We have very good ideological reasons for ignoring, vilifying and condemning pragmatic solutions to problems of all kind ... even if the evidence points to those solutions having effectively solved the problems in the past. In our hearts, we KNOW we're Right!