Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Mark Belling is going to be here tomorrow, and eventually at some point after we've exhausted all the many Marks that we have for you lined up as guest hosts, Elle Rushbow is going to return to the golden EIB microphone.
You know, we were talking – I mentioned earlier in the first hour this business about the stimulus package and this poor woman in California who had the eight babies by in vitro fertilization.
I don't know.
I basically said that what we're seeing in Washington is the in vitro fertilization of federal spending.
And just like this crazy California woman who had six kids, she's unemployed, she's divorced, she lives in a tiny home with her parents and she's had another eight kids by in vitro fertilization.
That's exactly what they're doing in Washington.
We couldn't afford the last round of spending, so what we need to do is inject even more massive government spending into the system.
And I just wish that the Congress was getting half the bad press that this poor woman out in California is getting.
What's her name?
Nadia Suleiman, 33, has been lambasted by talk show hosts, fertility experts, even her own mother, who has her hands full taking care of Ms. Suleiman's other children, ages two to seven.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, her mom, well, she was basically going to be, her mom was basically being congratulated on becoming a grandmother.
You're a grandmother for the 40th time.
That's great.
She can't leave the house.
She's looking after, she's spending her whole life looking after the first six grandkids.
And now Nadia Suleiman goes and has another eight grandkids.
That's basically, that is what we're seeing, the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget.
And, you know, I love the way, you know, politics, you know, what was it they used to say?
Everyone's in favor of motherhood and apple pie.
Well, since this woman in California came along, no one's in favor of apple, no one's in favor of motherhood anymore.
Apple pie, they're doing, what's it?
Denny's doing free apple.
No, it's free bacon and eggs at Danny.
No free apple pie.
Maybe apple pie's gone the way.
Well, yeah, actually, that's bad for you, isn't it?
Didn't Obama say we couldn't just sit around setting our thermostats at 72 and driving our SUV and eating apple pie or something?
Boy, he's one tough president.
So motherhood's over, apple pie's over.
This is a whole new America.
You know, I mentioned just before we came on air, Tim Geithner went out and the president, and they announced that they were capping executive salaries at banks that essentially the U.S. taxpayer is now on the hook for and at all businesses that U.S. taxpayers are now on the hook for.
And they're capping these salaries at 500 million because people are mad.
You know, they're saying, well, look at these guys.
They're just carrying on as usual.
They're jetting off to their vacation homes in the Virgin Islands on the private jet, and they're not taking anything seriously.
Look, if you take this thing, if you take this executive pay thing seriously, you're crazy.
You've got to keep your eye on what you're doing.
You've got mail.
What really matters here, and what really matters, is that what really matters is not the executives getting all this money.
You know, they'll do okay.
They always do.
The thing about capitalism is it eventually catches up with you.
Eventually it catches up with you.
And you just wind up, you'll be out of work.
And okay, you'll have enough money to go and live in Switzerland or go and live in Belize or wherever.
And that's fine.
That's the way it goes.
Capitalism is self-correcting.
You look at the guys with Enron.
The whole thing goes belly up and they get prosecuted.
When does government ever get called to account?
You know, Barney Frank says he's embarrassed.
He tells these bankers, you know, people hate you, and now because we're hanging out with you, they hate us too.
As I said, he's doing this like high school chit-chat.
It's the new version of, it's a line from that Lindsey Lohan movie, Mean Girls, except it's the new version of Mean Girls starring Barney Frank.
Everybody used to like Barney Frank until he started hanging out with people from all these horrible banks that nobody likes.
I mean, this is this is the point.
Barney Frank, no one ever calls Barney Frank to account.
Barney Frank has been there in that office as that congressman, massively responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all this other stuff.
And the Barney Frank Congress is not self-correcting.
And that's why this distraction about, you know, we should cap executives' pay, that's nothing.
That's nothing.
There's going to be a lot more of that, by the way, because once the government, that's the point about government.
Once it's in the system, the government has the right to pass laws relating to every aspect of the system.
So if your company is 20% owned by the United States government, the United States is going to be passing laws saying that, you know, you can only earn so much money and you're not allowed to use the executive men's room anymore.
You've got to go to the same one that all the regular folks go to.
I mean, you're going to get more and more laws like that the minute you have government actually taking a role in private parts of the economy.
By the way, that's one reason why I've always been opposed to government health care, because once you have government health care, the government can basically tell you how to live your life on the grounds that they're paying for it.
Exactly the same argument Tim Geithner and Barack Obama are making about the executive compensation.
They're saying, well, look, taxpayers are paying for it, so we have a right to cap it.
And that's the same thing with healthcare.
Once taxpayers are paying for it, they have the right to cap that.
So they start telling you how to live your life.
So if you're overweight and you want a hip replacement, they say, no way, we're not giving you a hip replacement.
You're too fat.
We're better to cut our losses and let you die.
If you smoke and you get a bit of heart and you get some heart trouble, they say, no, no way, we're not treating you because you smoke, and so there's no point treating you for heart disease because you're going to die anyway.
Get out of here, get lost.
That's not an exaggeration, by the way.
That happens every day if you go to a hospital in Birmingham or Manchester, England, or southern England.
They've got all these things.
You can't get a hip replacement if you do this.
Because once you have government healthcare, it tells you how to live your life.
And that's what we're seeing now in the private sector, in the business sector, in the financial sector.
And the problem here is left to their own devices, the market would self-correct.
Every time you interfere with the market, you delay the self-correction.
That is what we're seeing in the United States.
The reality is that a lot of these assets are overvalued.
We had a housing crisis in part because people who shouldn't have been buying homes were given ridiculous mortgages for property that is not worth what they paid for it.
We have essentially people expecting to make ludicrous profits on mediocre assets as a permanent feature of life.
That cannot be.
At some point, gravity reasserts itself and everything comes back down to earth.
And the house that you wanted to make, you know, so people think, well, I bought this house for $200,000 and I was going to sell it for $1.3 million, but now the market's collapsed and it's only worth $600,000.
So I've lost, I've lost three-quarters of a million dollars.
No, you haven't.
No, you haven't.
What you're left with is an asset that appreciates reasonably over time, which is what a healthy housing market is.
It's actually good in the long run to let these overvalued assets sink to what their true value is.
And attempting to interfere with that, as the United States government wants to do, is only going to prolong the agony.
You know, this is like a basic rule of economic life.
If you have an inflationary, a permanent inflationary housing market, that just makes it more and more difficult for people to buy homes.
Right now, it's a time.
Actually, if they didn't have this stupid Community Reinvestment Act and all the subprime mortgages and all the rest of it, now is just a great time to buy a home at a regular price on a regular mortgage.
You can go out and get a great deal on a nice home, get a regular mortgage.
You don't need subprimes.
You don't need the Community Reinvestment Act.
All this government stuff does is just get in the way.
And now what we're seeing is the classic Obama move, that you put some surface gloss, a nice frilly veneer on the situation while not addressing what's really going on.
You know, it's exactly what he did at Gitmo when he said, oh, you know, we have to be true to America's values.
So he announces a commission to look into closing Gitmo.
But in the meantime, then much more quietly, he decides he's going to keep this rendition thing where the poor jihadist, you know, if the jihadist is in a jail in Minneapolis, he's going to have Miranda rights, he's going to have legal rights, he's going to be entitled to this, entitled to that.
But if you just put him on a plane and send him to Yemen, the Yemeni guys will just take him to a basement and solve your problem for you nice and quietly and nobody gets to hear about it.
And so Obama has put a very nice sort of veneer on the new, you know, we're not torturing people anymore.
We've outsourced our torture.
You know, it's now just another job that Americans won't do.
But fortunately, the Yemenis and the Pakistanis and all the rest of the guys will do it for us.
And that essentially, dealing with the surface thing, is what he's done here on executive pay.
He said, I'm going to do a little bit of showboating here.
I'm going to cap executive pay at half a million dollars.
That's going to do nothing for you.
If you're unemployed now, if your home's been foreclosed on now, Barack Obama saying, oh, we're going to do something about these executives isn't going to make any difference to that.
The reality is, we need to hold to the same performance and accountability standards, these government figures like Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, because the fact is that the market will take care of the useless fat cat.
If a fat cat is useless, he's going to be a retired fat cat pretty soon.
And yeah, he'll still have a nice house and a nice car, but he'll be washed up and over and no problem for anyone.
The problem is that the useless fat cat in Congress who is there as a permanent feature of life.
And when Barney Frank starts saying to bankers, oh, you know, people used to like me, but now I'm hanging out with bankers and everybody hates bankers and now they hate me too, that is ridiculous.
Prioritize your hatred.
Don't waste your time hatred the guy at the first, the president of the first National Bank of Dead Skunk New Mexico.
It's not worth hating him.
It's much better focusing your anger on Barney Frank because he's a permanent feature of life And these executives with the Jets and the vacation homes are not.
So prioritize your anger.
Barney Frank is a far bigger problem for this country than any of these bank executives.
This is Mark Stein on the EIB network, sitting in for Rush, and we will be back with more straight ahead, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Michael in Atlanta.
Michael, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hey, Mark.
First things first, I want to tell you your humor has been spot on, especially the Scott McClellan witness protection remark about Gibbs.
Scott McClellan, that isn't a joke.
That is a national tragedy.
Yeah, I can assure you.
No, we have to keep it.
My favorite line by the Ayatollah Khomeini of all time is he was asked about Islam's approach to humor, and he said, quote, there are no jokes in Islam.
So I'm relieved.
I'm making the most of it until the Islamists take over, and then the show will sober up.
But it's great to have you with us.
What's your point, Michael?
Well, what I was going to say was I actually have two points.
One, people like Nancy Pelosi have inspired me to be looking at four to six years down the road, I want to run for Congress.
Currently, I'm in the process of finding a new job, but when I figure out where I'm going to land, I fully expect to be involved politically because if that idiot can get elected and be Speaker of the House, then how on, it just gets amazing.
Now, Nancy Pelosi is one of the towering colossi of the age.
And I'm sorry, but we cannot have this disrespect to one of the political titans of the United States.
But Michael, I will take, I would recommend you do run for office because the way things are going in this country, it makes sense to get a government job.
You know, the fantastic thing about running for office, by the way, is you can run for Congress and get elected and things work out for you for a couple of years or whatever.
And then eventually people turn against you and you lose your election.
You get these, the benefit packages at Congress, even they're just fantastic.
Even if you pay your taxes, like a lot of these guys apparently aren't so eager to do, but even if you pay these taxes, you still get fantastic, what they call these retirement packages for people who get defeated in elections.
That's what I mean about, you know, when we talk about, people sometimes make a big deal about these golden parachutes that guys get when they leave companies.
It's nothing compared to the golden parachute that every mediocre congressman or senator gets.
It's the place to be.
Government work is the place to be in Obama's America.
Well, that's right.
But, you know, the other thing about her that gets me, and I can understand why a place that tends to be left-leaning or pink communist like San Francisco would elect a liberal Democrat or a socialist to office.
However, what I don't understand is why they've elected that idiot, because she absolutely, it amazes me from stimulating the economy with birth control.
That might stimulate something, but I don't think it's the economy.
And, you know, 2,000-year debate of the Catholic Church on abortion that she mentioned last fall during the campaign, it just amazes me.
I mean, the only person that I can think of on the left that actually was somebody that deserved to be listened to was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
But, you know, there aren't any Democrats like that now.
They're complete balloons, all of them.
Well, you know, the thing about this is that you look at that little line I mentioned earlier about Nancy Pelosi saying 500 million Americans lose their jobs every month.
Now, if a Republican had said that, if George W. Bush had said that, that would be on every late-night talk show.
That would be relayed in news clips all over the world.
That would be in all those books saying 10,000 dumb things Bush said this month.
The phalanx that protects a Democrat is in a completely different category.
You remember that thing?
Bush, what was it?
I think it was the G7 summit in Tokyo.
And Bush goes to open a door and it's shut.
So he's like the president of the United States.
He's walking up forcefully to open the door and then it won't open.
And he put it like a goofy because Bush, to his credit, never cared about all this stuff.
So he puts like this goofy look on his face.
And then he's plastered all over the newspapers as, oh, the moron, he didn't even go to the right door.
The other day, Barack Obama strides up to the White House to walk through what he thought was a, I guess, a French door, and it turns out to just be a window.
So he's standing there baffled, trying to figure out how he can't get in this way.
Nobody put that up on TV and said, boy, what an idiot, what a boob.
And the point about this is, as I said, right at the top of the show, it's like when Bush came in in January 2001, the press had spent the entire presidential campaign saying this guy was an idiot.
Remember, they were always springing these pop quizzes on him.
You know, name the general who's running Pakistan.
And he didn't get them right.
So by the time he got there in January 2001, and that was like some TV guy, was it some TV guy in Boston who said, name the general who is running Pakistan.
And somebody made a very good point is that Bush, when Bush didn't know, and the TV guy said very smugly, well, you should know.
You're running to be president of the United States.
The Bush had just said, well, okay, you're in TV.
Who played the professor on Gilligan's Island?
But, you know, Bush isn't as insecure as that.
Bush isn't as insecure as that.
And every Republican who runs for office has to have a thick skin.
And every Democrat, as Barack Obama is learning, can be praised to the skies.
But at some point, the gap between the Chris Matthews' leg tingles and reality has to kick in.
And right now, what's happening is that Chris Matthews' leg may still be tingling, but there are 300 million Americans out there whose legs are not tingling.
Reality is always going to kick in eventually.
Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
We will have lots more straight ahead.
Hey, great to be with you.
Rush is going to be back fighting fit next week.
I think Tuesday Russia's back, isn't he?
And Jason Lewis will be here on Monday.
I know I was joking that Mark Foley was going to be here.
Yeah, and people were getting excited.
They were saying, wow, Mark Foley's just, what a shame he's only doing one day.
The Mark Foley channel.
I don't know if Mark Foley is out there.
You need to call your agent because there is a big-time national syndicated radio show waiting for you.
We have had more calls about getting people excited about the Mark Foley show.
But I hate to say it.
It's not going to be Mark Foley.
Rush is going to be back on Tuesday, and Jason Lewis will be in on Monday.
You know, it's not been a great time for the Hopi Changey crowd.
It's been a tough couple of days.
When you start actually seeing what some of these fellows who are in the new administration actually are in favor of, Cass Sunstein, now he's a Harvard law school professor, and he's actually one of the saner guys in the administration.
And he, listen to this, he's made no secret of his devotion to the cause of establishing legal rights for livestock, wildlife, and pets.
This is a business that they've had in certain parts of Europe.
Austria wanted to, you would have to go through proper adoption policies.
If you couldn't just sell a pig to somebody, you would actually have to go through and get adoption papers and sign the, and it'd be a lot more difficult than, say, having eight kids.
There's no canceling.
It's perfectly healthy to want to adopt a pig, unless, of course, you're Muslim.
I do apologize.
I'm not suggesting, I don't want to be disrespectful for any.
Pig was a random example.
Let's make it a goat.
Everyone loves goats.
I love that.
In fact, I saw in one of the Saudi newspapers, they had the winner of the most beautiful goat in Saudi Arabia award in one of the Saudi papers a couple of months ago.
And let me tell you, she was one terrific-looking goat.
So I'm not anti-goat.
It's not just Austria, by the way, Spain passed a law wanting to give guerrillas and apes the right to vote.
So if you think Chicago machine politics is me now, wait till you got the guerrilla red forcers robing the streets.
So these guys are animal rights, and this Cass Sunstein wants to be able to establish legal rights for livestock, wildlife, and pets here.
Actually, come to think of it, I think there was a guerrilla who was registered for the New Hampshire primary back in the 70s.
Apparently, in guerrilla years, you have to be 35 to run for president.
And apparently, in guerrilla years, he qualified.
He was 35 in guerrilla years, and he was a simian.
And apparently, he was born in the United States, so he was allowed to be in the New Hampshire primary.
And presumably, presumably, if he owed a quarter million dollars in back taxes, he could be in the Obama cabinet now, that gorilla.
I don't know where he is.
But anyway, these animal rights, animal rights, are a big concern of Cass.
So you've got all these people with these pet causes, literally a pet cause, of course, in the case of Cass Sunstein's thing.
So it could be lots of interesting policy decisions ahead.
Let's go to Bob in Taylor, South Carolina.
Bob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Mark, thanks for doing a really good show.
I was sitting here yesterday listening to you.
I'm home here with a surgery on my Achilles tendon.
So I put on the radio, and all of a sudden, you were the best therapy I had since I've had my surgery.
Anyhow, listen, I recently read a book on Thomas DiLorenzo, the real Lincoln, and I started listening to what some of these policies were that Obama has, and this comes right out of the Whig Party platform of 1840 to 1850.
Right, that's Whig with an H, not Whig in the Governor Blagojevich sense.
That's right.
Okay, Whig with an H.
Okay, just so we're clear here.
Okay, so it's protectionism, you know, with tariffs, internal improvements, federal banks, and this cronyism stuff, okay?
And basically, the South was against all of these things, this general welfare clause with, you know, building canals and railroads and everything else.
But Henry Clay never really seemed to have much success with this, and he was the head of the Whig party.
But Lincoln idolized him, okay?
Now it seems as if Obama idolizes Lincoln with basically what his philosophies were, okay?
So it's like history continues to repeat itself, you know, this strong federal government versus states' rights.
You know, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
Well, the thing is, though, if you go back to the early days of this republic, and you're right, you talk about Whig policies in the early 19th century.
At that time, you're talking, it was much easier to fence off a nation from the rest of the world, especially if you've got a couple of oceans between you and anywhere else that matters.
The difficulty now is that that is not possible.
You know, I'm often, you often hear when you bring up these things like this by American policy and other protectionist things saying, well, this is what America ought to do.
It needs to take care of its own first.
But the idea that the United States can hold the entire planet at bay when it can't even enforce its borders against two relatively benign nations like Canada and Mexico.
I mean, whatever it is now, they say that since the economy slowed down here, that in fact several large numbers of Mexicans have gone back south of the border.
So maybe, maybe, maybe total economic collapse will solve the illegal immigration problem.
You know, these things go both ways.
There's swings and horses, swings and roundabouts, whatever it is, cats and horses.
I don't know.
You win here, you lose there.
It all evens out over the end.
Let's go to Jerry in Lexington, Kentucky.
Jerry, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hey, how are you today, sir?
I'm doing great.
I've had a little time to calm down.
I want to start the conversation with Barney Frank and end it with Al Gore.
But in the middle, I want to talk about the frustration that a lot of us out here feel.
First of all, to Barney Frank, Barney, no one liked you before.
This didn't sway them.
And as far as the stuff goes on with this absolute insanity, you know, I get on the treadmill every morning.
I'm running, I'm watching Fox News, MSNBC, CNN.
And all these interviews with the president, they sit down and he says, we must pass this bill or the United States will just dissolve.
Right.
And yet, nobody, I mean, I want to see one of these guys have a little guts.
And I'm expressing this from all my friends that sit around, and we practically throw rocks at the TV and say, okay, Mr. Obama, explain to me how $21 million for a Philippines in the Philippines is going to create jobs and go line item per line item, as he said he would do, and explain to the American people the 75% pork in the bill in answer to it.
No one is holding him accountable.
Well, you know, his answer to that would be if you don't like the fact that this bill is 75% pork, if it were a regular bill, it would be 93% pork.
You know, that is basically his explanation for it, that we should be grateful in times of crisis that Congress is only being 75% insane and irresponsible about this.
And he's right.
In Barney Frank terms, that's a good result.
Comparatively, that's Barney being serious.
The bill only has 75% pork in it.
For Congress, that's a good bill.
You know, and that's unfortunately the reality of what life's like at the federal legislature of the world superpower in the early 21st century.
That's what really frustrates me is I guess it's great for the Filipinos, and I guess it's great for the seventh grader that's going to get a condom.
And as far as this global warming thing, I'm sitting in Kentucky under four feet of ice.
I'd like to see Al Gore explain this to me.
Oh, I'm sorry.
It's not a consensus that this is really happening.
So that's your Al Gore point that you're under four feet of ice.
Well, you know, that is the perfect state of the planet because if you went, you know, when you talk to these global warming guys like Al Gore, when they say, oh, you know, the temperature increased by 0.7 of a degree across the course of the 20th century, that presupposes that the planet is like a thermostat, that it has a correct setting.
Well, the question then is, what is the correct setting?
And if you went back to North America during the Ice Age, I'm not sure.
The whole of Canada and the whole of the northern tier of states were under ice.
Now, I'm not sure if Kentucky was under ice, but if you're saying you've got four, whatever it is, four foot of ice there right now at the moment, that is a great job Al Gore is doing at returning the planet to its edenic state in which two-thirds of North America is under permanent ice cover.
And once we do that, we'll all be able to, we won't have to worry about global warming ever again.
That's great news.
There's ice in there's ice cover in Kentucky.
Terrific.
The Al Gore plan is working.
This is Mark Snyder sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
We will have more straight ahead.
Stay with us.
Mark Stein in for Rush at the Golden EIB microphone.
You know, I mentioned right at the start of the show all these headlines from around the world suggesting that the rest of the planet is already disillusioned about the whole hopy changey thing.
Here's one I missed.
This is from the Times of London.
British judges accuse Obama administration of suppressing torture claim.
So it's even back to the old Bush torture thing now.
I mentioned, you know, in the old days under the Bush regime, they used to insult foreigners deliberately when Rumsfeld would make these cracks about old Europe and whatever.
It's all happening accidentally with poor old President Obama.
You know, he was supposed to have given up.
The Bush administration is quite upfront.
Dick Cheney was on TV just a couple of weeks ago talking about how marvelously restorative properties of waterboarding.
You know, it's the sort of thing every character building should be, we should probably introduce it to the 10th grade.
Dick Cheney was completely upfront about this stuff.
Now the foreigners are already saying that the Obama administration is suppressing new information about torture.
Let's go to Ronnie in Michigan in this era of hope and change.
Ronnie, you are on the Rush Limbo Show.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Mr. Stein.
It's an honor to speak to you.
Hey, great to have you on the show.
Awesome.
I just wanted to make an observation.
I find it a little disturbing the way our President Obama is always on TV and everything making statements of how bad this economy and the country are.
Right.
And like there is, you know, no getting out of it.
Right.
And like, I guess I look at it like, where's the confidence and where's the hope that is what's conveyed by him that has obviously not come to fruition yet.
No, you know.
I'm a little outraged.
No, no, he is right.
All he is saying is that America is the tunnel and he is the light at the end.
America is the abyss of despair and he is that bright shining star that you can see as you plunge ever further down into the into the abyss of despair.
And this is what people mean by his positive rhetoric.
His positive rhetoric has been going to go around and say, oh, you know, this is the greatest crisis since the 1930s and all the rest of it.
Which actually isn't true.
You're in Michigan.
Even in Michigan, right?
Michigan, you have that terrific Canadian governor who's made an impressive start on reducing you to a third world basket case.
But even in Michigan, do you have like 29% unemployment and soup kitchens on Main Street with lines backed up a couple of miles up the street?
You seen any of that there?
It's not that bad yet.
Give Jennifer Granham another term or two.
And she'll manage to do that.
Did you vote for Governor Granham, by the way, Roddy?
Could I ask you that?
Oh, Lord, no.
No, we started our depression here in Michigan about right around the time she was elected, and we haven't gotten out of it yet.
Right, right.
Well, good luck to you.
That's what happens when you let these crazy Canadians into run things.
Actually, all those, you know, the way it usually goes in federal elections, when the Democrats lose, they always say, oh, I can't stand this anymore.
I can't stand the thought of living under Bush.
I'm going to move to, if Bush wins again, I'm going to move to Canada.
And they never actually do move to Canada.
But if you want to get a sense of what it might be like, try going and living in Jennifer Granham's, Michigan, and you'll get a good sense of it.
And I'm pleased to report, by the way, that Jennifer Granham is a senior economic advisor to President Barack Obama.
So what she's done for Michigan, she could be doing to you.
Just bear that in mind.
Let's go to day.
Oh, another Kalamazoo Michigan.
Oh, Dave, Dave was on the line from Kalamazoo, and a town I love, by the way.
If you're a foreigner, the only thing you know about Kalamazoo is I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.
And it is one of those things that taught me about American rhyming.
I love the way gal rhymes with the cal of Kalamazoo.
It's like, oh, Dave is back.
Dave is back from Kalamazoo.
Dave from Kalamazoo, Michigan.
I was just killing time, treading water, reminiscing about I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo, which is the famous song from your town.
You're on the air.
Well, I have a gal in Kalamazoo.
Do you?
I've been married to her for about 44 years.
Hey, good for you.
Yeah, it's good.
Hey.
I was calling in this afternoon to see what you think about this Obama thing with not aiming at housing.
I'm a builder here in Kalamazoo, and this Fix Housing First that's out in the Senate right now, they're talking about it, but they seemingly fixed the car industry yesterday with giving them a bailout.
But the problem came first with housing.
I do not understand why they don't try to fix housing first.
It would seemingly help our economy and get things moving.
There's a tremendous put a bottom on this whole thing.
There's no way that you're going to fix this thing without putting a bottom on this housing market.
We have homes in foreclosure.
Yeah, but homes are spiraling down in value, and the only way you can do it is to fix housing first.
Well, let's break that down a bit.
The thing is, if you wanted to fix housing, do you want it to be fixed federally?
Because there are significant regional variations.
When you look, for example, I live in northern New England, and my house has fallen in value over the last year or whatever.
I don't know what it is.
It's maybe fallen 10, 15, 20 percent.
In other parts of the country, houses have fallen a lot further in value.
Now, in my part of the world, there aren't many subprime mortgages, so there haven't been many foreclosures.
The foreclosures are concentrated in the south and west.
In other words, we don't have a national, in a sense, we don't have a national phenomenon here.
We have certain regional phenomena that have manifested themselves.
And who knows best about that?
You're in Michigan.
Do you really trust Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to know enough to be able to craft a solution to the housing and the property market that will take into account all these regional variations, Dave?
Not one bit.
I don't trust them.
They're the ones that caused the whole problem to begin with.
Fingers in with Fannie Mae and Freddie Meddock.
But at the same time, we're into this recession period and it all started with housing.
And it has been a known fact that since World War II, housing has always led us out of a recession.
If they know all these things, why don't they go down and start and help something with housing?
There's a stimulus package out there that are trying to put through up to like $15,000 that a person would get if he would buy a home, any home.
And it's not just for builders, it's for anybody that would just go out and buy a house.
And they're trying to do that right now in the Senate.
And that I think is even going on today.
Yeah, but you have to, as you say, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
What happened was the government distorted the housing market.
So, in a sense, if they were honest about this, they would get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
There's no need for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Basically, if a guy does not qualify for a regular mortgage, he shouldn't be given a house.
I mean, that's the basic rule there.
I got to go.
We'll return to this, Dave.
I got to go, got to run.
We're late with this break, but we'll be back with more straight ahead.