BLOG VIEW: The 2012 presidential election campaign is speeding up, but in the rush to the White House, it appears that a significant issue has been left at the curb: the continued collapse of the housing market.
In the June 13 debate among the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, the word ‘housing’ was mentioned only seven times. The word ‘foreclosures’ only received three mentions, including two by debate moderator John King of CNN.
I have been curious to hear how the Republican contenders plan to solve the problems facing the housing market – after all, much of the campaign palaver has focused on the broader subject of the national economy or the healthcare debate. After hearing some of the responses, however, I am still in the dark on how most of the would-be presidents want to tackle the problem.
Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, was directly asked during the June 13 debate about housing. This is his verbatim response:
‘Well, the first thing we need to do is get the government out of crony capitalism. We have this alliance between big government, big unions and certain big bailout businesses. And as Congressman Paul said a few minutes ago, we had politicians in Congress trying to micromanage the housing market – and they created a bubble, and they created the mess. And now we have all these innocent bystanders, the good people of the United States of America, many middle-income and modest-income people, who've been devastated by this.
‘And so the market is going to have to adjust. The programs that President Obama has put forward haven't really worked. They've been a failure. They've been slow. They haven't really solved the problem.
‘But the best thing that we can do is get the economy moving again. And it's not going to happen by growing government. His way failed. We've got to get the private sector going. We have to have people starting businesses, growing businesses, building things, starting places of employment. This is how we're going to get money back in people's pockets and get them financially stable.’
The ‘Congressman Paul’ that Pawlenty referred to is, of course, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who offered this approach to the housing crisis (again, this is a verbatim quote):
‘We're doing what we did in the Depression. We're doing what the Japanese have done. You need to get the prices of houses down to clear the market, but they're trying to keep the prices up. They actually have programs in Washington which stimulating housing. You need to clear the – clear the market, and then we can all go back to work. But what we're doing now is absolutely wrong.’
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was the third candidate to address housing – sort of. Again, a verbatim quote:
‘And New Hampshire is proving that the issue people care most about is getting this economy growing again, so that we can have rising housing prices again. People can have the kind of incomes they deserve. They don't have to wonder whether the future is brighter than the past. People in New Hampshire love the future.’
None of the other candidates in the June 13 debate addressed the subject of housing – though, in fairness, no one bothered to ask them for solutions. I made an attempt to find the candidates' position statements on housing on their campaign websites, but I was not lucky enough to locate their solutions to this problem. (If I did miss their answers, I would appreciate if one of our readers would point it out in our Comments section below.)
I have not decided which person to back for the 2012 election. And the candidates are not making my life easy, because I am placing a great deal of my support on their response to the housing crisis. President Obama, to date, appears to have inherited a bad pre-existing condition and made it much worse. But the Pawlenty and Paul ‘don't do anything’ approach, Romney's vague ‘fix the economy first’ cheering and the silence from the other candidates aren't very promising alternatives.
As an undecided voter who is seriously concerned about whom to vote for, I am finding myself adrift in electoral waters. Hopefully, as the campaign progresses, some much-needed specifics will begin to emerge and this serious subject will be given the attention it demands.
– Phil Hall, editor, Secondary Marketing Executive
(Photograph courtesy of the National Museum, Oslo)
