Daily Read - 1/25/10

The New Orleans Saints are on their way to the Super Bowl. Good news for a town that could use a morale boost.

A 7-year-old boy from London has raised more than $161,000 for Haiti relief! Charlie Simpson "had hoped to raise just £500 for UNICEF's earthquake appeal by cycling eight kilometers (five miles) around a local park." (CNN, here)

Barney Frank is considering "abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance," according to a Boston Globe article. Under any new system "any entities receiving government backing would need to be more heavily regulated to limit risk, with greater product restrictions on mortgage-backed securities and higher capital than what Fannie and Freddie had," says David Min, an associate director for the Center for American Progress. Would the new system include provisions to prevent Barney Frank and other politicians from pressuring lenders to lower standards so they can campaign for re-election on the platform of increasing homeownership? Would the new system provide stiffer penalties for people who fail to pay their mortgage, or would it just penalize taxpayers and/or Wall Street?

The government is in a precarious position. The removal of more than $1 trillion of support for the mortgage market is "a momentous test of whether the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have succeeded in jump-starting the housing market and ensuring it can hold its own. The stakes for the economy are massive: If the market again falls into a tailspin, homeowners could face another wave of trouble." (Washington Post, here)

James Carville argues in the Financial Times that Democrats haven't blamed Bush enough. Instead of trying to "march forward in a new post-partisan environment", Carville suggests Obama should carry on with a far-left agenda because "Nothing can change Washington." I guess he thinks hope and change are dead.

Here's an interesting chart (right) from the USA Today's article on how government spending cannot be significantly changed without doing something about entitlement programs.

Meanwhile, Obama intends to use his State of the Union address this Wednesday to announce that middle-class Americans are entitled to twice as much of a tax break for having children, forgiveness for portions of their student loans, and a taxpayer-subsidized employer-based retirement plan (Washington Post, here)

James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation is on the WSJ's opinion page today says "typical union member now works in the Post Office, not on the assembly line," and discusses some possible implications.