Dean Baker and Robert Kuttner debate how to deal with the housing crisis:
Baker: Unfortunately, these sleepwonkers are still designing policy. Their current bailout proposal, the Dodd-Frank bill, would help many of the banks whose bad lending practices fueled the bubble. It will do little to help the homeowners and communities most affected.
Kuttner: However, it is a mistake to think that the best policy is one of benign neglect, for there is nothing benign about a situation in which American homeowners stand to lose two trillion dollars of their net worth, and foreclosures proceed at the rate of 25,000 a week. Most Americans losing their equity, and sometimes their homes, are innocent bystanders; they did not take out sub-prime loans and they were not speculators. Some of the hardest hit victims are hard working blue collar Americans whose only sin is to be homeowners in neighborhoods with large numbers of foreclosures.
Dean Baker also has the latest Meltdown Lowdown:
The new Case-Shiller housing data showed that prices kept plummeting in April. Real house prices in the 20-city index were falling at close to a 26 percent annual rate over the months from January to April. Since their peak in the summer of 2006, real house prices have dropped by more than 23 percent. This means that we're probably a bit more than halfway to the bottom of the bubble.
And Courtney Martin writes about celebrities and politics:
A recent survey by California-based E-Poll Market Research gave 1,100 voting-age men and women nationwide a list of 46 attributes and asked them to identify which of these traits they believe applies to a given celebrity or candidate. McCain's closest celebrity match was, believe it or not, Bill Cosby. And Barack Obama's? Ronald Reagan. Seeing the first black Democratic presidential candidate matched with a Republican -- and his Republican opponent matched with a black man -- is enough to make you believe that, just like in Hollywood, anything could happen.
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--The Editors
