When The Cat’s Away, The Mice Will Play

While the US media spent 12 days keening for Michael Jackson, our Congressional Clowns continued their headlong rush to pass additional damaging legislation.

The financially destructive Cap and Trade bill passed the House with provisions that prove the “green” movement is more about control of citizens than about the environment. Some of the items seldom mentioned are regulations that force bureaucrats to inspect your home in person before allowing you to obtain a building permit to remodel anything. Then they get to come again before you can put it on the market; if they decide anything is amiss, you have to correct it before it’s advertised.

Those freedom restrictions are in addition to increasing utility costs for every household and increasing costs on everything that’s manufactured in America and thus eliminating jobs in the process.

Not only was it passed without being read, the staffers had not even finished writing the bill before the final vote was taken.

The media didn’t mention those items because what little time they had left after covering Michael Jackson’s family, friends, influence, music, wealth, will, lawsuits, and needle marks was used to advertise the “need” for Democrat versions of health care reform. As frequently happens nowadays, competing bills by Republicans like Dr. Tom Coburn that promote natural market forces to effect savings in health care were deemed unworthy to be brought to public attention.

But, the coup de grâce was delivered by our dear friend, Barney Frank. He used the distractions in the news to introduce TARP for Main Street Act of 2009. As has become routine, the name of the bill does nothing to reveal its outcome. It’s anything but a bill for Main Street.

When Congress passed the TARP bill last fall, the law was written to force banks to pay dividends and loan payments to the general fund of the Treasury to reduce the public debt. Its supporters repeatedly reassured us that TARP was really an investment and we would eventually enjoy a profit.

But Barney’s fingers got itchy when a little bit of money began to dribble into the coffers the second week of June. So he introduced a bill to change the original intention of the TARP bill and instead use the money to fund some of his favorite causes. To wit:
1. Use a billion or so to fund a low-rental housing project that was previously mandated, but not funded. (Hasn’t fifty years of low rent housing proven to be ineffective in every city in the US?)
2. Give $1,500,000,000 to ACORN and other groups for the purpose of “neighborhood stabilization.” (That means that many neighborhoods inside the city are “stabilized” rather than allowed to "gentrify.”)
3. Allocate $2,000,000,000 to subsidize people who are delinquent on their mortgages. (In addition to the money that has already been allocated to allow dead beats to stay in their homes a few months longer.)
4. Hand over another $2,000,000,000 to "stabilize multifamily properties that are in default or foreclosure." (Assisting deadbeats with bigger bills.)

It’s going to be a long, hot summer.