Mel Watt's Christmas Gift To ACORN And Democrats
Posted on IBD, 12/30/14, 06:12 PM ET
Cronyism: The Obama regime has quietly ordered Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac to start donating hundreds of millions of dollars a year to a permanent
affordable-housing slush fund for Democratic activist groups.
Earlier this month, while few were paying attention, Federal
Housing Finance Agency chief Mel Watt sent letters to the mortgage giants to
"set aside in each fiscal year 4.2 basis points of each dollar of unpaid
principal balance of new business purchases to be allocated to the Housing
Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund."
That's a 0.042% tax to equip the funds. HUD will run the
housing fund; the Treasury Department will run the capital fund.
If the funds had been operating in 2010, when Fannie and
Freddie together bought $856 billion in new mortgages, Fannie and Freddie would
have pumped a whopping $360 million into the funds. Estimates put their total
for fiscal
2015 at half a billion dollars.
The money will help build apartments for extremely
low-income Americans, says Watt, the former Congressional Black Caucus leader
whom President Obama hand-picked to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The funds will
also help the
poor afford their own homes through down payments and other
assistance.
But nonprofit housing activist groups will distribute the
funds. So count on money being diverted to ACORN fronts and clones, beholden to
the Democratic Party, who in the past have laundered housing grant money to
finance political campaigns.
As we've reported previously, ACORN affiliates are still
operational in New York and other cities, having renamed themselves after ACORN
was busted for fraud and corruption during the 2008 presidential campaign. They're
also still receiving HUD housing grants.
In the past, these groups have used HUD grants to pressure
banks to make ill-advised home loans that sped the mortgage crisis. Now a
permanently funded war chest will aid their shakedown ‹ courtesy of taxpayers
still on the hook for Fannie and Freddie.
The last thing the nation needs is another Washington scheme
that further politicizes the lending and home-building markets. Yet rest
assured that will be the end result of these national housing funds. Making
matters worse, they're unaccountable to congressional appropriators, making
them ripe for corruption and cronyism. We're talking about billions
of dollars funneling through left-wing nonprofits and
floating around in urban reinvestment projects sponsored by the likes of Rahm
Emanuel and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
With this potential $500 million slush fund, moreover, the
Obama regime is effectively turning Fannie and Freddie into off-budget welfare
agencies, indeed, a self-sustaining shadow government for the left wing that
will survive even Republican administrations.
Now we know what the president really had in mind when he
promised to "reform" the bankrupt mortgage giants.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/123014-732671-obama-orders-fannie-freddie-to-set-aside-housing-slush-fund.htm#ixzz3NQwbI3aG
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