Paul Ryan Saw the Housing Crisis Coming a Decade Ago

Hey, did you know that Paul Ryan was one of the few members of Congress way back when warning about the housing crisis and trying to do something about it? Not that anybody listened to him, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who continue to claim they inherited a crisis. Was it a crisis of their making, or at least a crisis they could have avoided? Yep! Not that they’ll admit it today.

The Wall Street Journal has the history lesson of the day:

On July 27, 2000, a first-term Congressman from Wisconsin signed his name to the Housing Finance Regulatory Improvement Act. The 30-year-old legislator didn’t have much company. Of 435 Members of the House, only 12 were willing to join Paul Ryan in sponsoring a bill to reduce the taxpayer risks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Eight years later to the day, a federal bailout of the two mortgage giants was on its way to the desk of President George W. Bush. Almost $190 billion in taxpayer financing later, the toxic twins of the housing crisis maintain their massive role in mortgage finance.
[...]
Mr. Ryan’s embrace of reform in his first term in Congress compares favorably to the efforts of a freshman Senator from Illinois in 2005. President Obama likes to pretend he was a warning voice in the wilderness because he later issued vague statements of displeasure once the housing market was already cracking.
What Mr. Obama doesn’t say is that he failed to support any of the serious reform efforts to reduce the role of Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage market. The same is true of old Senate hand Joe Biden. Mitt Romney was never a Washington politician, so he can’t be blamed for the legislative failures of the 2000s.
This history bears further study, as Mr. Obama repeatedly attempts to tie the GOP candidates to Washington’s policy mistakes leading up to the financial crisis. In Iowa this week, the President said that Messrs. Romney and Ryan are proposing the same economic policies “that got us into this mess in the first place.” (Read More)

Remember this the next time you hear some Democrat talking about the mess they inherited or how Romney and Ryan want to take us back to the same of failed policies. They were in favor of those failed policies, while Ryan was trying to reform them and Romney was no where near Washington, DC.

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