by Lance Thompson

The wrangling over the financial bail-out will undoubtedly be settled in a very costly fashion. The question is, what lessons can be learned from this expensive instruction?

Years ago, under President Clinton, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed legislation that coerced banks to make home loans available to those with limited cash for down payments or compromised credit histories. Though some lenders protested, it all seemed so kind and generous–helping the underprivileged afford first homes.

The financial instruments that made such loans possible multiplied and diversified. There were loans with minimum down payments, loans with no down payments, loans with variable interest rates, loans with deferred interest, loans with balloon payments, loans that were approved on wildly inflated or falsified incomes, loans that allowed the borrower to decide how much his payment would be each month.

These all served to introduce to the market two vastly different but equally dangerous groups–unqualified buyers and speculators. Both contributed to the housing boom and the subsequent bust.

Unqualified buyers were relieved of the necessity of saving for a down payment, establishing a strong credit history, or even of having sufficient income to make regular payments. All these were unnecessary with the new categories of home loans. Hundreds of thousands of people who could never have afforded homes before now bought them at an ever-increasing rate.

A flood of new buyers raised demand, and the value of homes went up. When these new buyers bought the most affordable homes, the sellers of those homes were able to buy more expensive homes, and the increased value rose through every price range until there was a tremendous demand for real estate.

This brought the second group into play–speculators. As home values rose ever faster, the old paradigm of buying a house, living in it a while, making improvements, and later selling it for a profit seemed hopelessly archaic. It was now possible to buy a home today and sell it tomorrow and make a profit. This was called "flipping," and with the new loan instruments that required minimal down payments, and a steadily rising real estate market, it seemed foolproof.

But neither the unqualified buyers nor the speculators possessed that vital component of home ownership–an investment in the house itself. A homeowner invests a substantial amount of his or her own money in the purchase of a home. This is why banks, in the old days, demanded twenty percent as a down payment. They wanted to ensure that there was a commitment by the buyer.

But the zero-down loans that proliferated and enabled unqualified buyers and speculators to snap up houses like half-price computer games ensured just the opposite. New buyers invested little, risked nothing, and felt no commitment to the houses they were living in. As Ross Perot used to say, they "had no skin in the game."

The government allows homeowners to deduct interest on real estate loans because the government knows that home ownership represents an investment in and a commitment to a community. Homeowners represent stability–they get jobs in order to pay mortgages, they raise families, pay taxes, and take an interest in the neighborhood in which they live. The financial incentive for all this is their home, the biggest investment most people ever make. When hard times come, these homeowners work harder, save more, and spend less so that they can make their mortgage payments and keep their homes.

But unqualified buyers who had to put little of their own money into their houses, and speculators whose intent was merely to resell at a higher price as quickly as they could, had no such investment in their properties. They were not homeowners, and when the real estate bubble burst, they could just walk away.

Those who favored the loan programs for unqualified buyers called it a success, at least until the market crashed. They bragged about how so many disadvantaged people could buy homes for the first time. They believed that owning a house would create that commitment to community that most homeowners have.

A generation ago, the concept of self-esteem was misunderstood in much the same way. Social scientists and educators thought that children who misbehaved were suffering from a lack of self-esteem, and so endeavored to provide or confer self-esteem. They did this by banishing competitive sports and games, by inflating grades and dumbing down tests, by refusing to call any answer right or wrong for fear of damaging the self-esteem of those who answered.

But self-esteem cannot be conferred. Self esteem emanates from the effort and struggle to succeed, whether the result be victory or defeat. Self esteem comes from striving for a goal, whether it’s winning a basketball game, studying for a test, or working hard and saving for a home of one’s own.

Zero-down and other financially irresponsible loan packages were the same as those games in which everyone’s a winner. The result no longer matters because nothing is required to attain it. Self-esteem that derives from always winning is as empty and fragile as a real estate market that soars because anyone can buy a house. Both are illusory and doomed to fail.

Eventually, the politicians will hash out a compromise on the financial crisis we now face. But if we don’t learn the lesson that home ownership requires struggle, sacrifice and personal commitment, we shall find ourselves in exactly the same situation in the very near future, and again be forced to pay for a lesson we should have learned long ago.

In the predawn hours a few weeks before the election, a telephone rings in Chappaqua. The junior senator from New York picks it up, and before she can even say "hello," the strained, weary voice of her opponent in the primaries abruptly begins...

By Rose Pedenko and Tanya Simon

In 1917, Vladimir Lenin spearheaded his leftist revolutionaries in a massive people’s revolt, which smashed Russia’s monarchy to dust, and forever disfigured the face of worldwide power politics.

Nearly fifty years later in the 1960s, radical feminists and other useful idiots here and abroad placed a bear hug on Lenin’s adage that “a lie told often enough becomes the truth,” and wouldn’t let go. Those hipsters believed that their efforts would absolve them of negative connotations, hostile repercussions, or the drilled-in-stone truths in connection with the fresh-anointed “pro choice” movement – or so they thought. They were, to a large degree (and to the detriment of all things sacred), successful. They inculcated the notion of “choice” into their husbands, into their offspring, into their work, and into their fused-at-the-hip hippie mates. “Choice” (not unlike “Change”) began to spread and ultimately rooted itself into the American lexicon, into legislation, and promulgated to extremes in the media.

In a recent article, feminist Camille Paglia expressed that “Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.” Sarah Palin has unwittingly thrust a cool new wave of social reform upon us again. Not a huge step backwards, as may initially be thought, but a giant leap in the true meaning of womanhood.

Why bring up the abortion argument now? The answer is simple: Because the time is right. Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin ’s rocket-launched emergence onto the battleground for the presidency is proving to be the liberals’ worst nightmare on the topic of abortion as well as the true meaning of “choice.” She has struck a chord of dissonance in the hearts of the opposition party when Carol Fowler, South Carolina’s Democratic Chairwoman, says that Sarah Palin’s primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion .

Additionally, Mrs. Palin’s strength of will and character is the ultimate threat to the Democrats’ bitter fight for the White House. Sarah Palin also happens to be the embodiment of all things female, and is a walking, talking contradiction to every argument espoused by the Left and social moderates -- that women are less superior intellectually, whose choices must be made for them, not by them.

The proof by assertion on the left that a fetus is not a human being worthy of protection (even from its own mother) is the kind of rhetoric that the feminist left built their power base on. Again, as Paglia notes, it evolved into their obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women’s movement. By never referring to fetuses as human beings, radicals have rationalized the heinous act of arbitrarily extinguishing over 40 million lives. Two generations of talking points for politicians and the media have been brainwashed into the population, much like Madison Avenue advertising.

Abortion has become an acceptable alternative for responsibility and respect for life. Derision is a favorite elitist reaction to the idea of abstinence -- as if only the uneducated are sucked into an idea whose core is based on common sense. It is not just the sphere of the religious right as they would have you believe. Apparently, common sense among the elites is not so common. Even the word “choice” is chockfull of contradiction when applied to the abortion movement. We are all pro-choice, except that our choice occurs before and not after conception.

Leftists and ill-informed moderate feminists have accepted that rape and incest pregnancies are common instead of rare and have used that position as their hue and cry because it was easier than personal responsibility. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s exemplary life flies in the face of so many of those proofs by assertion promulgated by the feminist movement. The fact of the matter is that assault and incest rape pregnancies are rare. Under optimum conditions, the fecundity that comes with youth and good health is approximately 20% in any given cycle. What should be rare -- irresponsibility, ignorance, carelessness and downright stupidity -- is not. For a great many American women, abortion has become the birth control of choice (no pun intended).

The abortion movement has almost reached its goal of making partial-birth abortion law. Barack Obama has come down in favor of this extreme position and holds out this egregious error in judgment and logic as an example of being in touch with the people.

Sarah Palin, in one fell swoop, has eviscerated the arguments of the women’s movement with respect to those other choices we were supposed to have made, i.e., children or career; or “children and career” by simply being all that a woman can be.

In this final analysis, the one unforeseen consequence of the pro choice and feminist movement was the long-range negative effects on population growth. (Someone forgot to pass the word along to all of the illegal immigrants and fast-growing Muslim populations in America and Europe.)

We have painted ourselves into a corner with respect to the long-term viability of Social Security by cutting down the numbers behind the Me Generation. We are aborting ourselves into extinction.