Honesty Is For Suckers

It hasn't been a good day for the Obama administration. Their credibility is shrinking in light of their juvenile slap fight with Fox News, the GAO releases a report showing that the TARP funds for the most part just evaporated into thin air,the Nancy and Harry comedy duo can't get their act together on the healthcare takeover plan, and former vice president Dick Cheney delivered a smack upside their head as far as a plan for Afghanistan that is going to leave a mark and now this comes out this afternoon.

It seems, according to this inspector general, that tens of thousands of people have received $8,000 checks from the government for purchasing a new home that were not eligible to receive such checks. We aren't talking about some little technical detail in the paperwork where they didn't dot all the I's or cross the T's. No we are talking about checks being cut for children as young as 4, illegal aliens, and at least 53 IRS employees, whose job it was to oversee the program to start with.



Now of course there is talk on Capitol Hill to extend this program.

How many times do you have to be the victim of scams before you finally learn the lesson that if you give away other peoples money the line of people to que up with their hands out will extend to the horizon?

New Housing Data Shows Disparate Impact by Region

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Starts of new homes in the United States dropped by 2.1% to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 1.47 million in May, the softest pace of groundbreaking since January, the Commerce Department estimated Tuesday.
Meanwhile, building permits rose 3% to a 1.50 million pace as authorizations for new apartment buildings and condo projects surged.

So you have a mixed bag with new home starts down but building permits up. So there is a shift to home fix ups and multi-family housing, plus likely some weather related impact to home starts. But most intersting to me is some regional data at the end of the article:

Regionally, May's starts jumped 16% in the Northeast and the Midwest, while they fell by 2% in the South and by 20% in the West.
As a result, building starts in the West are now down 38% compared with last May, the largest year-over-year decline in the region in 16 years.

Rarely do economic changes hit equally in all geographic regions. Here you can see where "the West", however that is defined in this article, is experiencing a significantly slower building economy than elsewhere. The northeast and midwest is going full speed ahead.