The Politics of the Real Estate Crisis

Their views of what happened to cause this mortgage crisis are as divergent as their policies to fix it. The Democrats believe that brokers, banks, and even Wall Street took advantage of borrowers and that in order to fix it the government needs to step in and bailout those borrowers. McCain believes that this was a speculative market (much like myself) and that not only should the market should correct itself without any government interference, but that most bailouts of any sort would only be bailing out those that were irresponsible.

By viewing the world through those prisms the two sides, the Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (who's plans were remarkably similar) came up with solutions that couldn't diverge more from their Republican counterpart, John McCain.

The Democrats want a bailout, lot's of new regulations, rate freezes, moratoriums on foreclosures,and with it the creation of lot's of new bureaucracy to administer all the new regulations. They've already promised a plethora of new tax increases to go along with this and other spending.

McCain said there will be no bailouts for anyone that was irresponsible on any level of the crisis. He believes the free market is the best mechanism to deal with the crisis.

Now, the conventional wisdom says that the public wants the Feds to act and act decisively. Is this really so? After all, if you think about it 90% or more of all loans are being paid back on time. That means any bailout will be financed by that 90%. I think the Democrats have overstated how much the public will go for a bailout.

Their bailout is more big government, higher taxes, more regulation, and more bureaucracy that is familiar of many of their tried and frankly failed policies. The Democrats are betting that McCain will look as though he doesn't care and has no plan.

It is, on the other hand, McCain's job to sell his free market vision against the Democrat's regulated, bloated, and more bureaucratic vision. It seems like it would be easy to sell free markets when given the choice that way. What McCain needs to do is make that appeal to the 90% that have made their payments on time. If he does that he will actually gain the edge on the real estate crisis.