Letter to Senator Casey

I just sent this letter to Senator Bob Casey in response to an email letter he sent me: Dear Senator Casey, In your letter to me of 10/3/08, you wrote: "Like you, I am not happy with the current crisis, and I'm angry about the climate of deregulation and deference to Wall Street over the last eight years that got us into this mess." Senator, you know as well as I do that the "climate of deregulation and deference to Wall Street over the last eight years" is not what got us into this mess. President Bush has tried on several occasions to get Fannie and Freddie under control but has been stymied by Congress. The root of this crisis is the Clinton effort to provide so-called affordable housing to low-income families. By requiring mortgage lenders to lower their borrowing standards, the housing market was flooded with new buyers, which ran home prices up faster than ever. Then, as the cost of gas and other essentials began to rise, suddenly these unqualified buyers were unable to pay their mortgages. This opened the flood-gates on foreclosures, which caused stagnation and decline in the housing market. Then we began to see foreclosures on homes that could not be sold for enough to pay off the principle on the mortgage. AIG, as the insurer on many of these bad loans, suddenly found itself without adequate resources to pay on the mortgage insurance claims. This is why we are in the current mess. It is not that Bush has failed to regulate; it's that he was saddled with the Clinton regulations that required banks to make loans to people who were not credit-worthy (sub-prime mortgages). This is exactly the kind of regulation that needs to be done away with forever. It is an unwelcome incursion of federal power into the free market. So Senator, don't bother trying to bluff me. I know what caused this mess, and I know that the bailout bill passed by the Senate is exactly the kind of bloated legislation that causes the American public to hold most of the members of Congress in contempt. What, for example, does requiring health insurance companies to pay for mental illness treatments have to do with solving the current crisis? I wrote you asking you not to support this bill, but you did anyway. So be it. I hope the House will be wise enough to reject it.

For back-up support of what I'm saying, watch this short video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QBRIsCkGQ0