Govt meddling led to housing crisis

Read Thomas Sowell here:

Our current economic meltdown results from the federal government — under both Democrats and Republicans — declaring home ownership to be a “good thing” and treating the percentage of families who own their own home as if it was some sort of magic number that had to be kept growing — without regard to the repercussions on other things.

We are now living with those repercussions, which include the worst unemployment in decades. That is the price we are paying for increasing home ownership from 64 percent to 69 percent.

How did we get from home ownership to 15 million unemployed Americans? By ignoring the fact that there was a reason why only 64 percent of families owned their own home. More people would have liked to be homeowners, but did not qualify for loans under the mortgage-lending standards that had been in place for decades.