Obama and the housing mess

Let me get back to a book by Hugh Hewitt called The Brief Against Obama. This is a powerful indictment against the President for so many failures. Hewitt’s next chapter has to do with the collapse of housing under his watch.

Here are some statistics to get the big picture. In 2006 around 24 million homes were built in the U.S. By 2011 that number had declined to 4 million, a huge drop. Hewitt says the loss of each home built comes to 219 jobs that could have been held by workers. In addition, foreclosures, as we all know, have skyrocketed since 2006. Then there’s the loss of home value. The average price of a new home was just over $300,000 in 2006, but that had slumped to $267,000 by 2011. Many people owe more on their homes than what they are valued at.

What did Obama do to help this situation? He launched a lot of initiatives to help individual homeowners, but none to help the housing market. But that’s no surprise. Coming from a background as a community organizer, he focused on individuals as part of a political organization built on misery and resentment.

This is just one more reason to return Obama to the private sector this November. There are plenty more reasons that I’d like to explore in the next couple of weeks.