The Market and Mother Nature. The Foreclosure Fiasco. Shall we count the ways? 1. It is more about public relations than problem-solving. Pick a program — any program — that the Obama administration unveiled to help troubled homeowners over the past four years. Not one has amounted to a hill of beans. This settlement is no different. The country’s primary bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — which, along with the Federal Reserve, engineered the settlement — is trying to make it look like a victory. Of the $8.5 billion, $3.3 billion will go directly to foreclosed-upon borrowers, making it “the largest cash payout to date,” according to Bryan Hubbard, the O.C.C.’s chief spinmeister. In truth, the O.C.C. needed to save face after a foreclosure review process it had mandated had become an expensive fiasco. 2. 3. Of course, the O.C.C. says that is the wrong way to look at it: Some people — military personnel, for instance — could get as much as $125,000 while others won’t get much at all. 4.
Arithmetic For Republicans: Why Boehner's 'Offer' Just Doesn't Add Up. If President Obama honestly wants to negotiate an agreement with Republicans before the year-end fiscal deadline, he must be deeply frustrated. And if he doesn't really want to negotiate with them, then he should be delighted, for the same reason: Their latest "offer" laid before him by House Speaker John Boehner demonstrates again their refusal to reveal their true intentions -- and their inability to do simple arithmetic.
Consider their treatment of Medicare, the popular social insurance program for seniors that Republicans have always despised. They have just emerged from a long national campaign in which they repeatedly and falsely claimed to "protect" Medicare from the president -- whom they accused of wanting to slash $716 billion from the program -- but now they complain that he won't cut it enough. The Obama cuts were mythical, but the Boehner budget proposal includes at least $600 billion in Medicare and Medicaid reductions. Peter Schiff: The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate. The Big Budget Mumble. The fiscal cliff’s not the problem. Washington is consumed with wrangling over how to deal with the specter of big automatic tax hikes that will hit Jan. 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire.
It’s also the day that the sequester kicks in, which is the budget-wonk term for an automatic process that will slow the growth of government spending over the next 10 years. This is the so-called fiscal cliff; it’s a fight that has important implications, particularly since some of the tax increases will have a significantly harmful impact on incentives to work, save, invest and create jobs. In a competitive global economy, for instance, it is bizarrely self-destructive to increase the double taxation of dividends and capital gains. And keep in mind that taxpayers already are getting thrown down a steep hill. This is all bad news, but it is not a crisis. And even if Obama prevails in the fight, that simply means that we get a different mix of tax hikes and spending rises at a faster rate.
This bomb won’t explode this year or next year. Keith Hennessey: Time to Call the President's Budget Bluff. In an F.H.A. Checkup, a Startling Number.