Our Economic Groundhog Day
Looks like Mitch McConnell picked the wrong time to shove another government mortgage program down our throats. He says that housing prices are still plummeting and that people desperately need cheap and guaranteed government loans to right our economy.
The housing market, on the other hand, has no freaking idea what McConnell is talking about.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Pending sales of existing U.S. homes rebounded in December, data showed on Tuesday, as buyers waded back into the market to take advantage of lower prices and mortgage interest rates.
The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in December, surged 6.3 percent to 87.7, rising for the first time since August. Compared with the same period a year-ago, pending homes sale were up 2.1 percent in December.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast pending home sales to be flat in December.
In other words, it’s a little like Groundhog Day. People are poking their heads out of their holes, seeing cheaper houses and affordable mortgages, and are scampering to take advantage. That doesn’t mean they can’t be scared away. We intrepid citizens have taken the MSM’s pet economists by surprise again (but isn’t that always the case?) and have given reasonable folks a reason to believe that, if we don’t overreact, we can come out of whatever economic turmoil we’re in sooner rather than later.
That is, if our members of Congress don’t do something insane like pass a ginormous spending bill that is guaranteed to do to our hopes what a sandblaster does to an oyster cracker.
Enter the intrepid Republican Knucklehead Brigade, led by Mitch McConnell (and including John Ensign, Bob Corker, and Lamar Alexander), who can still louse things up royally. If they manage to introduce another giant government mortgage program, it’s going to cast a very long, dark shadow on the would-be buyers out there and they’ll duck back into their holes. Instead of six more years of winter, though, it could mean six years of recession or worse.
It strikes me as sad that we have to fight so hard to wrest control of our own money away from meddling members of Congress. It’s more sad that many of those meddlers are Republicans.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Mitch McConnell, the Democrats’ Best Buddy (Update: BOHICA!)
- Time to Replace the Redistributionist Republican Leadership
- Don’t Let Congress Build Our Cars, Please?
Category: The Economy and Your Money, The Republican Minority
