Main Street

Interesting Things Around the Internet

• California is investigating the credit ratings agencies that told everyone that risky banking practices were fine, dandy, and safe. Good thing, and about time someone did it.
• The Federal Housing Administration’s cash reserves are dropping below their required minimum, what with the mortgage crisis.
  

  The FHA, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, insures home mortgages against losses, thus helping prospective borrowers obtain loans. It uses the insurance premiums paid by these borrowers to pay for mortgage defaults. Since its creation in 1934, it has never used taxpayer money to cover losses at its flagship home-buying program. But rapidly rising defaults have burned through the agency’s reserves, raising the prospect that it would have to take dramatic action.
  The reserves are meant to ensure that the agency remains solvent and can continue helping people get mortgages, which in turn supports the housing market and wider economy.

  Calculated Risk saw this coming a few weeks ago.

• MomsRising had a great health care round-up focusing on the effects of reform on families.
• 62.9% of doctors want a public health insurance option. Just 27.3% want a private insurance-only system.
• It’s Union Label Week. Find out ways to buy American and buy union.
• Matthew Yglesias:
  

  Back in April, Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) proposed an amendment that would deliver a $250 billion cut in the estate tax. This was described as an effort to help farmers and small businessmen, but in reality “only 0.2 percent of the proposal’s cost, relative to the cost of making 2009 law permanent, would go to tax cuts for small business and farm estates.” The other 99.8 percent of the cost, about $249.5 billion dollars, was aimed at inheritors of estates worth over seven million dollars.

  But wait, there’s a punchline. Sen. Bayh is now lecturing us about how important it is to reduce the deficit, and how that should be done completely by reducing spending. Apparently we should still be cutting taxes for the multimillionaires, though.