Jan 4 2008 9:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Unlike my colleague Erin Erickson, I'm a big political junkie. (How big? At IBS 2004, which coincided with the Iowa caucuses, my colleagues went out for drinks, etc., in Las Vegas, but I passed. Why? I was in a hurry to get back to my hotel room to watch the results come in on CNN. It's a sickness.) So naturally I want to comment on last night's results.

I'd like to put it in a housing perspective; to talk about what these results mean for you and your business. Unfortunately, that's hard to do, because as Erin and Paul Deffenbaugh have pointed out, the leading candidates have seemed content to ignore housing issues. The only candidate who had a lot to say about the issue, Chris Dodd, dropped out after registering below "uncommitted" last night. Clearly, nobody was paying attention.

If you do some searching, you can find something about this on most of the candidates Web sites. And because I'm here to serve, I'll do the work so you don't have to. Here's what the remaining candidates have to say about housing (in non-partisan alphabetical order.) Considering that generally Republicans are in favor of smaller goverment, it's no big surprise that the Democratic candidates have more involved plans to address the issue. It's pretty clear, though, that across the board, the candidates don't see this as a major issue.

• Hillary Clinton - She has proposed a plan that would freeze adjustable rates for at least five years, but done little beyond that.
• John Edwards - He's called for a seven-year freeze on interest rates, a halt on foreclosures until lenders offer one-on-one assistance for borrowers and creation of a new federal regulator to oversee lending.
• Rudy Giuliani - Doesn't seem to have much to say on the issue.
• Mike Huckabee - The new Republican frontrunner doesn't have anything to say about housing, beyond that every child deserves "decent housing." However, he has proposed a new "FairTax" that would abolish the income tax system and replace it with essentially a national sales tax on purchases of new products. (It's complicated, but you can read more here and here. For an alternate view, go here.) I'm no economist, so it's hard for me to make sense of the good or bad of this, except that anything that will significantly increase the price of a home (which some opponents say it will) is not good in the current climate.
• John McCain - Another candidate who isn't talking about housing issues.
• Barack Obama - His plan calls for a 10 percent universal mortgage credit for homeowners that don't itemize deductions, increased funding for investigation of mortage fraud cases and creation of a fund to help people refinance their mortgages. He's also proposing a law that would require all lenders to use the same simplified metric to show costs and interest rates in order to make it easier to compare different loan offers.
• Ron Paul - Not surprisingly, considering he once ran for president as a Libertarian, Paul is against government intervention in the mortgage mess. He does talk generally about the importance of property rights and reduction of eminent domain powers.
• Bill Richardson - He says he'll make things better. Doesn't say how, but it will be better. Gives me a nice, warm fuzzy feeling.
• Mitt Romney - He seems to have missed that there's a housing crisis in this country. Can't find a single mention of it anywhere on his site.