Chuck

I’m letting the personal attacks go only because you are directing them at me. Otherwise your comment would be deleted.

You know, my mother taught me that name-calling was more likely to detract from my argument than add to it- that if I wanted to make a point, it’s more effective to try and sway someone with logic. If your argument is brilliant insults won’t help make the point. If it’s not brilliant, insults won’t help either. My mother is a very bright woman.

I’m not “late to the game” with my fondness for the Constitution. I read it through for the first time when I was twelve, and have been using it as a reference ever since. I do not however, share your unique interpretation of the Constitution. I know how the U.S. is governed and sadly, it doesn’t have much to do with the Constitution any more. I wasn’t surprised when Pelosi was asked if she thought that Obama’s healthcare plan was Constitutional and she responded, “You’re kidding, right?”

I’m far more interested in the original limited government envisioned by George, Sam, Thomas and the boys in 1776 than in the numerous court cases since then. Even if I weren’t however, I’ve seen a lot of section 8 housing, and none of it excites me. An entire nation of it sounds awful. The world you describe where everyone has a “right” to housing doesn’t do much for me either.

Your arguments kind of sound like this to me:

The only way to control how Congress spends with respect to a fact, is to take the fact OUT of the political system. Any halfwit with knowledge of the law could tell you that. But unfortunately, just because you LIVE in the U.S., that apparently doesn’t oblige you to actually find out how it is governed. Your discussion of the Constitution is utterly pathetic.

You only take facts out of the political system by increasing individually enforceable rights with respect to them.

Now, I know, with your petit bourgeois attitude, that you would LOVE to take property out of the political system and hand power over it, to individuals. You’re one of them there “property rights” folks. OK, dingbat, show me how to do it. Meet the legal test of West Virginia v. Barnette for taking a fact out of the political system.

Show me that property (or any other fact with respect to which you would like to control government spending) is:

1. a fact of human experience
2. which history demonstrates
3. is not affected by attempts to affect it.

YOU chose the ground, YOU chose the Constitution. Now you have to RESEARCH THE FACTS and THINK. Can you manage it?
I very much doubt it. The only response to what I am saying here will be fustion or evasion. You guys are CLOWNS.

That accounting rule change, which is so fraught that none dare even speak its name, is FASB’s no longer recent decision to derecognize QSPEs. At the risk of sounding a bit like jryskmpr, I’d like to point out that concern about accounting rule 140 has been my #1 macro concern from my first significant comment on this site in July ‘06 and in fact for years before that pre-retirement on ADM S&T’s web portal and jumping up and down like a demented gerbil in the coffee room at 9 Grove Street.

If anyone’s still bothering to review Safety Net IV, they’ll see that the Peter Eavis, who is the author of the WSJ piece featured above, had grave concerns about Fannie’s QSPE portfolio in April 2005. It was Bruce Harting’s 7/7 ‘08 research note that panicked the foreign cenbank horses and caused their rush out of agencies. The same red-line plunge that, mysteriously, stopped so dead in January of this year, when the Fed started its own historic buy of MBS.

Art. 8 Sec. 1 was invoked, by the way, by a “naive” anonymous questioner at AEI’s recent Subprime VI conference, with interesting results. (I put up a preview of that Q&A session just the other day.)

To reiterate what is the actual bottom line of this story, Agency Debt must be kept off the government’s own balance sheet at all costs, because giving it “explicit” support would double the size of the nominal value of US National Debt and turn everyone’s macro assumptions into custard. That’s why they’re turning themselves inside out on this issue.