Kevin Colby: News, culture, political blog

I have several useful links for you to click on after you watch the video

Association of Community Organizations For Reform Now

Community Reinvestment Act

September 2003 NY Times article:  President Bush proposed a new agency to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but was shot down by Democrats

Clark Howard was talking on his show the other day and had that Business Week recently reported on the Ford ECOnetic, a vehicle that gets 65 mpg, runs on diesel and is available in Europe only.  The reason why Ford isn’t selling the car in the U.S. is because they can’t figure out how to manufacture the ECOnetic over here without losing money on each car!  That’s because these idiot motor companies wanted us to buy the big gas guzzling SUV’s and now all of a sudden because of gas prices being high Americans want to buy smaller economical cars.

By 2010, we’ll have the GM Volt and other fuel-efficient cars. In the next few months, Honda will have an affordable hybrid available with a price tag in the upper teens.

It’s gonna take a while to make a long-term change. We will get there as long as we don’t lose focus when gas becomes cheaper.

What is funny about all this too is that the auto manufacturers made all these big and powerful cars and suv’s which they are stuck with and now they are crying that they need $25 billion in taxpayer money!  BOO HOO!

Read the full story on the Ford ECOnetic.

Damn, kids really are expensive.  Let’s see there are plenty of ways to prevent this from happening right?  There’s all kinds of birth control, then there is abortion and adoption.  So there is absolutely no reason for taxpayers having to foot the bill for a “F’N” (no pun intended) mistake!

Here are some quick stats for you:

The teenage birth rate in the United States was 53 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 2002^], the highest in the developed world.If all pregnancies, including those which end in abortion or miscarriage, are taken into account, then the total rate in 2000 was 75.4 pregnancies per 1,000 girls. Nevada and the District of Columbia have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the U.S., while North Dakota has the lowest. 95% of teenage pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended; approximately one third end in abortion, one third end in spontaneous miscarriage, and one third will continue their pregnancy and keep their baby. There are twice as many teenage pregnancies in the United States each year as there are in England, Wales, or Canada, and eight times as many as in Japan.

Read the full article.

The U.S. Government wants the taxpayers to pay to bail out homeowners who bought to much home and wall street that made irresponsible decisions caused by government telling banks to give out these loans.  Anyways, Forbes came up with a list of what could be done with $700 billion dollars:

Let’s start with the nation’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates our nation’s bridges need $180 billion in repairs, with our rail infrastructure in need of $185 billion in maintenance. California wants to spend $40 billion for the nation’s first high-speed rail network to connect Southern and Northern California.

Saskia Sassen, a professor on Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, points out that infrastructure investments would feed directly into gross domestic product, based on job and enterprise growth. And we certainly have the builders to do it. Unemployment in construction is 40% higher than in manufacturing.

Arizona Public Service, an electric utility, is building the nation’s largest solar power ray in the desert near Gila Bend, Ariz. It will be able to power 70,000 homes using only the sun’s rays — and will create thousands of high-tech green energy jobs. Construction costs will be about $1 billion, but the utility says the 3-square-mile project will pay for itself in about seven years. With $699 billion left over, you could put even more of the Southwest’s desert to work in creating clean energy.

Read the rest of the article of what we could do with this money.

Here are some links I found to give you some more information about what is going on with the financial crisis.

An institution that got us in this mess:ACORN

More bailouts coming

Article on mortgage crisis

Environmentalists try to use 700B Bailout to their advantage

Taxpayers for Common Sense

It seems that the Democrats and Liberal media has decided to slam President Bush on this whole economic crisis.  But the truth is that back in 2003 President Bush recommended a regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry.  A dramatic change in the industry since the savings and loans crisis back in the 80’s to early 90’s.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

The Republicans tried to get regulation but the Democrats in Congress shot down this piece of legislation and so now here we are.*

* Correction- So I did more research on this piece of legislation and found the bill that was introduced.  Only one person sponsored it and it never even made it to the house.  The bill was H.R. 2803 The Housing Finance Regulatory Restructuring Act of 2003. So I’m sorry if I had accused just the Democrats of shooting this down, it is both Republicans and Democrats faults.

Read the full story.