Home Ownership Falls to 48-Year Low

Three cheers for Barack Obama! After telling the American people for years how he saved us from the greatest recession since the Great Depression, Obama is going to ride off into the sunset and leave us to deal with the mess he left behind. And that mess is looking worse by the day.

According to new numbers from the U.S. Census, home ownership rates in the United States are at their lowest point since 1967. Falling to 63.4 percent in the second quarter of 2015, home ownership rates are traditionally looked at as a poverty indicator. And if these rates are to be trusted, there are a whole lot of Americans who are facing a bleak financial future thanks to a decade of terrible economic policy.

“All the governmental attempts at boosting homeownership has gotten us to this point in time with all the havoc it wreaked over the past 10 years. It’s just another governmental lesson never learned, of don’t mess with the free market and human nature,” said Peter Boockvar of The Lindsey Group.

Oh no, Mr. Boockvar, that’s not how Mr. Obama tells it. Why, he was just crowing about how healthy the housing market is a few days ago. “Wall Street reform now allows us to crack down on some of the worst types of recklessness that brought our economy to its knees, from big banks making huge, risky bets using borrowed money, to paying executives in a way that rewarded irresponsible behavior,” Obama said Sunday.

The president was defending the Dodd-Frank legislation that put a thousand pages of new regulations on major U.S. financial firms. These regulations prevented lenders from issuing loans to risky borrowers, but they have also tightened credit to such a degree that many Americans find themselves shut out altogether. Combine that with sluggish wage growth and a labor force participation rate that continues to dwindle, and you have the current state of the nation.

Of course, this will come as neither a surprise or as bad news to Democrats. Wealthy Americans, after all, don’t have to depend on the government for a hand out, and there are few better paths to wealth than home ownership. If the voters are drowning in debt and unable to build their assets, they will be much more susceptible to the siren song of welfare in its many forms.

All the signs of a sick economy are in place, and we aren’t going to recover until we get someone in office who understands the power of the free market. Obama’s regulations only help the already-wealthy while crushing the middle class. We need a champion for the people, not a charlatan selling dreams based on bad economic theory.