Some PA-08 Smoke And Mirrors From Tom Manion

I had to look really hard to find something post-worthy concerning the challenger for Patrick Murphy’s U.S. House seat in PA’s 8th district, seeing as how his “stealth” campaign is rating nary a mention in the newspapers.

Despite that, he did have this to say recently in the Bucks County Courier Times concerning the financial market meltdown…

Tom Manion, a Republican challenging (incumbent Rep. Patrick) Murphy in Bucks County, said: “We held interest rates too low for too long, allowed Fannie and Freddie to give out too much credit, messed up the banking regulators and were too focused on meeting unrealistic “affordable housing’ goals. It’s a mess, and now we’re going to have to work together for a solution.

This gives me an excuse to link to this landmark post by Devilstower at The Daily Kos once more that spells out chapter and verse how our markets were crippled by deregulation and investment in shadowy financial instruments such as something called a “credit default swap” (it’s explained fairly well, along with noting that it was cheered on by none other than Alan Greenspan, among others). And Manion is partly right here, I should note, but it’s laughable for him or anyone else to ignore what Devilstower is talking about; “messed up the banking regulators” doesn’t cut it as an explanation as far as I’m concerned.

Also, I don’t like this innuendo that somehow this is primarily the fault of mortgage holders who bought at the peak of the housing bubble. I think it’s important to recall that credit refinancing, along with commercial and residential real estate, were sectors of our economy that actually did well for a time under the ruinous Bushco reign while everything else tanked (you can infer the same thing I can about the fact that debt management was actually a growth industry). Borrowing excessively against home equity isn’t something I or anyone else should encourage, but we’ve only been playing a game where the rules – the few that actually existed – were decided upon by regulators, politicians and lobbyists, not by us.

This kind of reminds me of the editorial in the Murdoch Street Journal recently that blamed the Community Reinvestment Act for our current mess (Manion’s slap at “unrealistic ‘affordable housing’ goals” brings this to mind), when in fact, as Rick Perlstein noted here, CRA-covered institutions “tended to practice less risky lending, not more”.

Also, Manion brings us this pearl about the economy (under “immigration” from his web site)…

Tom also supports increasing the H-1B visa cap. Increasing the number of highly skilled foreign workers able to work in the U.S. will allow companies to keep operations in the U.S. and in turn create more jobs for Americans.

I know this is about what you’d expect from a Repug, but it’s no less revolting coming from him.

Also, I came across a quote from Manion where he questioned whether or not it would do any good to change the tax code in favor of job creation in this country as opposed to sending jobs overseas; I apologize for not having that link at the moment, but I’ll keep looking for it (probably somewhere else on his website - I thought this related article was informative; doesn't sound like the tax code has ever been changed to keep jobs here before).

Given the fact that Manion has lukewarm support at best for domestic job creation along with the professed desire to raise the H-1B cap as stated above (with those workers not contributing to our economy as much as permanent hires already living here, unless the new arrivals are doing really well), I don’t know how he can claim to speak as a government-sector expert on the economy; if there’s one thing I’ve had enough of, it’s professed CEO politicians.

And lest I forget, to help Manion’s opponent, click here.

Update 9/26/08: I forgot to note Manion's complaint about Patrick taking $15K from Rangel here; want some cheese with your whine, Tom? Let's let the Ethics Committee do its job first, OK?