Naples is still a risky market, although only by a teensy bit according to another analysis of Southwest Florida real estate. Nothing terribly remarkable about the story. It just suggests that prices haven't completely settled down yet, which everyone already knows. As usual, the real fun comes in the comments that follow. It is amazing how many "right" thinkers show up to blame the collapse of the housing bubble -- something that was predicted for years before it happened by experts who were denied a forum in which to share their concerns -- on Democrats, gays and the poor (I suspect they mean people of color).
If it hadn't been for that nasty Barney Frank and his nefarious sidekick Chris Dodd, acting in collusion with Bill Clinton to turn all the good properties over to people who couldn't afford them, none of this would have happened. The poor bankers, they didn't want to loan money to the riff-raff, but the Democrats forced them to.
Missing is any blame for the speculators and flippers and con artists who blew the bubble so big. Missing is any mention of poor Alan Greenspan, who arrived late to the party of enlightenment and was forced to admit that his handling of the Federal Reserve was based on principles that he now realizes do not apply. What principle? That bankers would always operate in the spirit of the common good. Really. He believed that.
But the teabag crowd has been warmed up to believe the unbelievable. In a day and age when people attempt to link Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the Republican platform, why would we be surprised?
Does any intelligent person seriously believe that the world's economy was upended as a result of trying to provide home ownership for lower-income workers?
That is as false as arguing that the food stamp program exists to serve the poor. It doesn't. It serves the grocery industry.
If we can resist the impulse to think shallowly, we can follow the money to the truth. The grocery industry lobbied hard to dismantle the the commodity program and replace it with food stamps. Grocery stores couldn't make money off people getting cheese and rice and peanut butter from the farm surplus warehouses -- which were themselves the direct result of welfare, I mean farm subsidies. Getting the government to hand out stamps let the grocery stores cash in. The poor might benefit, but they sure didn't have the power to put the program in place. They seem to be the only group anyone wants to blame, though.
The housing situation is no different. The Wall Street boys figured out how to bundle bad loans into packages of junk they could peddle to foreign investors. They needed product. So they made bad loans. Lots of them.
Trying to blame a program designed to encourage home ownership for the abuses committed by the Big Money boys is misguided and wrong. But it's easier to blame the poor folks than to look for the real answers.
The Tea Party movement was created and funded by corporate interests. Those same corporate interests benefit by offering scapegoats to deflect criticism of actual policies. Rush and Glenn and Sarah do a heckuva job of keeping those scapegoats -- whether it's Reagan's welfare mom, ACORN, or poor homebuyers -- out in front of the angry mob.
The real crime is that the mob is too angry, too ill-informed, too willfully ignorant to seek real answers. Like a brain-challenged greyhound, it just chases Sparky.
What a scam. And what a sorry commentary on this nation's ability to educate its young, or itself.
