I don’t know which of their sententious dwarfs this is, but he’s as incredulous as he might be if he were interviewing a four-headed creature from flyover country:
 In an interview on Fox News recently, you said that the government should not be bailing out people whose mortgages are about to reset to interest rates that they can’t afford. Foreclosures are at record rates right now. Wouldn’t doing nothing  as millions of Americans risk losing their homes  smack of Herbert Hoover deferring to the market as 25 percent of Americans were unemployed in the Depression?
Not at all. What you have is a situation where you have culpability on the part of the lenders and the borrowers. The fact is you need to encourage the lenders to try to work with those who have borrowed to keep from foreclosure because ultimately nobody wins. The banks don’t need an enormous inventory of property on their hands that they can’t move any more than the market can. The lender doesn’t need to be in default and ultimately bankruptcy and out of a home.But what we don’t need is a government bailout. That is not the purpose of government, to prop people up from every poor decision they make. In fact, when you do that … whether it’s in the world of finance or the world of drug addiction … it creates an enabling codependency. It’s the last thing that really helps people.Is there some way to bring some resolve to it? Yes. But it needs to be handled by the … people who made the mistake in the first place: overambitious borrowers and greedy lenders, who saw a way to suck people into interest rates that they should have known they couldn’t afford in the long term.
But apart from assigning an ethical or moral responsibility to the players in this problem, where does the government step in? What’s the role of the federal government, and if you were president and this crisis were deepening, what would be the role of the Huckabee administration in approaching it?
I think you would do similar to what the Bush administration has done. You wouldn’t bail people out with other people’s taxpayer money. You would ask those parties to sit down and find out is there a way they can resolve it. And the reality is, in some cases, yes, they can work it out. In some cases, they cannot. And there are consequences for people’s actions. If I drive 95 miles an hour and drive on icy roads, there are consequences. And there are a lot of consequences that the government can’t fix. And a government that can do everything for you is a government that can take everything from you. We don’t want that kind of government.
But there’s a different degree of danger in somebody who takes the risk of driving 95 miles an hour on icy roads and somebody who notices that real estate prices are going up all around them and buys a house one size too big. To your mind, moral hazard is still at work  you don’t want to encourage that kind of decision?
Well, the question still comes: If you’re a taxpayer, and you’ve responsibly made financial decisions, should you be made to involuntarily pay your house payment and that of your neighbor, who bought more house than he could afford, even though you acted prudently?
I will go on to another subject…. ÂÂ
Good idea. The roundtable discussion afterwards is almost as funny, so stick around for that.ÂÂ
Good points he brings up there, first serious intelligent thing I’ve heard him say. Too bad his personal actions don’t really demonstrate that he’s on board with actually carrying through on this in practice. It’s one thing to talk, it’s another to do.
“But apart from assigning an ethical or moral responsibility to the players in this problem, where does the government step in?”
Huh?!
Who said anything about the government “assigning an ethical or moral responsibility to the players”?
Beside the NPR airhead, that is.
Geez, it takes an NPR reporter to make Huckabee look smart, I guess.
By the way, I’m with Christopher T. on this – first intelligent thing Huck has said. But it’s kind of like an average person standing next to a midget – one of them looks taller.
Midgets and dwarfs !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAYyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Great idea, NPR. Let’s turn to the government, and hand over the private housing industry to them as well. Fuck healthcare. We want the government to police our home buying decisions as well.
Wait until NPR wants credit-card-debt bailout.
You can put your pledge on plastic, John.
as millions of Americans risk losing their homes  smack of Herbert Hoover deferring to the market as 25 percent of Americans were unemployed in the Depression?
Note NPR’s socialist mindset, exaggerating the hell out of the current situation with their bullshit 25% unemployment great depression comparison. What total crap. Last week CNBC was interviewing several people who were at risk to be foreclosed on. They typical mortgage holder interviewed was well dressed and well fed, complaining about not being able to meet their $500k mortgage. Cry me a river, and f*ck NPR for daring to compare today’s comparatively luxury-living highrollers to the people in the great depression who at that time were wondering where their next meal would come from.
Huckabee surprised me with his response though. I agree with him. I expected him to give one his typical ‘compassionate conservative’ responses like he does when discussing illegal immigration, lecturing us on how we need to just accept it because “they are human beings too”.. and “what of the children!” He did pretty good with that interview.
Tonite NPR blathered on about the Great Majority looking to
godgovernment to deal with the threat of Alzheimer’s. I know I was encouraged.Okay, so Huckabee wants us to take responsibility with our mortgages but not with smoking?
The man’s all over the place.
If anybody knows all there is to know about a debilitating brain disease that leeches away every last IQ point, it would be the government.
“Wouldn’t doing nothing  as millions of Americans find they can’t afford the homes they had hoped for “
Fixed that for you, NPR.
Where were they when the Kelo decision was fucking Americans who really did lose their homes?
Somehow NPR made Huckabee look like an economic conservative. Amazing work that!
The comparison to the Great Depression is quite a stretch, to say the least. Of course to the leftists at NPR we’re always on the verge of a new Depression whenever we have a Republican administration. I heard an interview with Amity Shlaes recently. She was asked specifically about parallels between the mortgage crisis of today and events in the 30’s. She said that back then people were losing their homes through foreclosure when they had 80% equity, something that simply does not happen today.
Many of the stories of foreclosure today are similar to these:
Call me callous but I have zero sympathy for someone who took a series of cash-out refi’s to live far beyond her means for a half-decade. Nor for someone who purchased a home with a mortgage 10 times her annual income. And the firms that lent them the money deserve to lose, too.
Hard to imagine someone working for a state-owned broadcaster being shocked by the notion of limited government…
She refinanced her house to pay off her car? Jeez, I thought I was bad with money.