Frank: Abolish Fannie and Freddie
Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
8/18/2010
Call it the New Modesty. Barney Frank suddenly can’t understand why government should push home ownership, nor why government should be involved in mortgages at all. In an interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business, Frank called not just for the liquidation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but also for curtailing federal government interest in home ownership:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be abolished rather than reformed as part of the Obama administration’s planned overhaul of the government’s role in housing finance, Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee, said on Tuesday.
“They should be abolished,” Frank said in an interview on Fox Business, when asked whether the mortgage giants should be elements in housing market reform. “They only question is what do you put in their place,” Frank said.
The Federal Housing Administration should be fully self-financing and Freddie and Fannie should be replaced with a new mechanism to help subsidize housing, Frank said in the interview.
“There is no more hybrid private-public,” the Massachusetts Democrat suggested. “If we want to subsidize housing then we could do it upfront and let the budget be clear about that.”
Why does Frank see the need to stop federal home-ownership initiatives?
“There were people in this society who for economic and, frankly, social reasons can’t and shouldn’t be homeowners,” Frank said. “I think we should, particularly, stop this assumption that you put everybody into homeownership.”
…Modesty in government is suddenly hot, even among Massachusetts liberals.
Read the entire article at HotAir.com
Update: At RedState.com Moe Lane writes, “With regard to the Fannie/Freddie thing, it never hurts to review the timeline.”
