Michael Reagan has declared in his Sept. 18 Newsmax column that Democrats are responsible for the current financial crisis. Why? Because the Clinton administration got rid of redlining:
To find the donkey, you need to go back to the Clinton administration, which decided that everybody and his kid brother was entitled to a mortgage even when they didn’t begin to qualify for a home loan.
In saner days, banks designated certain areas as no-loan zones — depressed neighborhoods where lending money to potential home buyers was not just a risky investment, but a certain future foreclosure.
Critics of the practice called it “redlining,” and President Clinton and his chums on Capitol Hill decided that banks should no longer act like banks and lend money only to home buyers who could afford to handle the monthly payments. Now all bets would be off and people not the least bit creditworthy — and speculators — would be entitled by law to obtain mortgages even when it was obvious they couldn’t afford to handle them.
Actually, redlining as people who aren’t Michael Reagan understand it — a refusal to offer banking services and/or loans in certain areas, which in practice was racist because those areas were invariably minority-dominated — has been illegal for decades. The Clinton administration merely stepped up enforcement of anti-redlining laws.
Does Reagan really want to bring back redlining and its attendant racism? It sure appears so.
A Sept. 19 WorldNetDaily article by Drew Zahn makes essentially the same argument as Reagan, blaming “unsound – though politically correct – lending practices” but avoiding the term “redlining.”