The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1465137
C-6 Wednesday, April 20, 2022 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Consumer financial protection gone awry The crises of recent years tend to erase from memory those that pre- ceded them. One, as you may recall, was the fi- nancial collapse of 2008 — a collapse deemed by many as the worst since the Great Depression. That collapse swept into power a government like the one we have now — the White House and both hous- es of Congress controlled by Dem- ocrats. Newly elected President Barack Obama appointed then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, who made popular the saying, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste." Indeed, the new Democrat admin- istration followed this advice and used the financial crisis as an op- portunity for a major expansion of government. Democrats wasted no time to as- cribe the financial collapse to busi- ness greed and insufficient regula- tion of banks and other financial in- stitutions. In 2010, the 2,300 -page Dodd-Frank Act was passed — with no Republican votes in the House and three in the Senate — adding 400 new regulations on financial in- stitutions. Included in this tsunami of new fi- nancial regulation was the creation of a new independent agency — the Consumer Financial Protection Bu- reau. The agency, originally the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was conceived with her view, shared by Democrats on the far left, that dis- parities in financial results between different communities must be due to racism and discrimination. So, needed, in their view, was an all-pow- erful bureaucrat in Washington to level the playing field. Now our financial institutions — banks, securities firms, credit unions, payday lenders, etc. — fall under the purview of the Consum- er Financial Protection Bureau and must submit to its scrutiny and over- sight. The CFPB has just announced sweeping new changes in its "su- pervisory operations to better pro- tect families and communities from illegal discrimination" Firms must make available to CF- PB "their processes for assessing risks and discriminatory outcomes, including documentation of custom- er demographics and the impact of products and fees on different demo- graphic groups." We might summarize this as finan- cial markets gone woke. Can a government bureaucrat re- ally determine why a banker did or did not make a loan, and should the heavy hand of government be in- volved here? Can it be the same thing when gov- ernment intervenes in how finan- cial institutions do their business as when government intervenes regard- ing who sits at a lunch counter? We can learn something about this from the financial crisis of 2008. According to the work of Ameri- can Enterprise Institute's Peter Wal- lison, the crisis was not the result of insufficient regulation of business but of government excess. It all started, according to Wal- lison, with government mandated A ffordable Housing Goals in 1992. These mandated that the two giant government-backed mortgage com- panies — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — set a quota of 30 % of all mort- gages they acquired from mortgage originators to be targeted to low- and moderate-income borrowers. By 2008, this was up to 56 % . In order to meet these quotas, lending practices were dramatical- ly relaxed. Downpayment require- ments dropped from 10 % to 3%; cred- it score requirements were relaxed, as were debt-to-income require- ments for borrowers. By 2008, according to Wallison, just before everything collapsed, "More than a majority of all mortgag- es in the U.S. financial system was sub-prime, required low or no down payment, or were otherwise risky." With the collapse of lending stan- dards, housing demand and prices went through the roof, and then the bubble exploded. Who suffered the most in the en- Kids' books Bookstores now sell only certain kinds of children's books. "Go into Barnes & Noble," says Bethany Mandel in my new video, "and you will be met with a wall of biographies. Probably 27 different books about former Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Great. A ton about Kamala Harris. Great." But where are the biographies on conservatives? There weren't any. She found lots on people like Hil- lary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cor- tez, Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Carson, but not one on conservatives like Margaret Thatcher or Amy Co- ney Barrett. "It's time to bring those books to the market because Lord knows the publishing industry won't," says Man- del. So, she created Heroes of Liber- ty, a company that will publish books on conservatives like Barrett, Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell. "You're indoctrinating kids just like the left does," I tell her. "That's a very fair question," she responds. "My answer is, read the books! " Her top seller is her biography of Sowell, who overcame adversity to be- come a famous economist. When Sowell's family moved to New York, his new teachers put him in a lower grade because they assumed that he couldn't compete. Sowell went to see the principal. "He didn't play the victim. He stood up for himself," says Mandel. "He said, 'I will prove to you that I'm capa- ble of doing fourth grade math.'" The principal actually listened and gave him a test. When Sowell aced it, the principal told the teachers, "Take this young man to fourth grade, where he belongs! " Sowell didn't let racism or poverty stop him. He helped pay his family's expenses by getting jobs, like deliv- ering groceries. By contrast, she says, books from today's big publishing houses portray Black people as victims who advance only through protest. Ibram X. Ken- di's popular "Antiracist Baby" teaches kids to focus on color. "If you claim to be color-blind, you deny what's right in front of you," writes Kendi. That's "toxic," says Mandel. "When you promote this hyperawareness of race, kids see their friend as Black, white or brown, instead of Lucy or Sally." Although conservatives make up about half the country, book pub- lishers rarely try to appeal to them. "When they produce 27 books about Ruth Bader Ginsburg or 'Antiracist Baby' board books, those are bought in bulk by libraries," says Mandel. Li- braries buy many more books than moms and dads. "(So book publish- ers) have this incentive built in to churn out progressive ideological books." That surprised me. I thought of li- brarians as apolitical. But no, today they are part of the progressive mob. Ninety percent of librarians' political donations go to Democrats. "It's our tax dollars buying 1,000 copies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and zero about Amy Coney Barrett," Man- del points out. Mandel is frustrated that "girls" children's literature rarely focuses on motherhood. The books suggest, "You can be a NASA scientist, an en- tomologist, (but) girls are not taught that you can have all these career am- bitions and also be a mother." Barrett has seven kids. Mandel's book says: "For Amy, being a mother is no less important than being a judge." Mandel's books are mostly about conservatives. She recently released one about John Wayne. I'm libertarian, not conservative, but I am still glad she's producing al- ternatives to what today's publishers pick. Other authors are fighting back, too. The Tuttle Twins' books feature libertarians like Frederic Bastiat. Ju- lie Borowski's books teach kids about the free market. All had to self-publish because tra- ditional publishers were hostile to people like them. Even illustrators turned down Man- del's books for fear of being "can- celed." "We have a hard time paying peo- ple many thousands of dollars to il- lustrate books! We're never going to get a book printed about Amy Coney Barrett with a Scholastic (or) Penguin Random House! " Fortunately, a free market can't be held back forever. Including regulating your air conditioning Once upon a time, the mantra of the libertarian Left was "keep the govern- ment out of the bedroom." President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to regu- late any gadget or appliance with an electric switch that turns on in your house or your driveway. New Depart- ment of Energy rules will dictate the amount of water that comes out of your showerhead, how much warm air comes out of your heater and how much cool air comes out of air con- ditioners. There is even talk about gadgets monitoring your home's tem- perature in the winter and summer months. How is any of this the government's business? The latest shower regulations are especially aggravating. The new wa- ter-efficient heads make you stand in the shower much longer to get wet and wash your hair because the wa- ter pressure is low. It's a drip, drip, drip policy. This is all reminiscent of the low- flush toilets mandated during the Bush and Obama years. These were designed to save water, but there was so little water flow that you had to flush two or three times. So it end- ed up not saving water at all. Light bulbs, swimming pools, re- frigerators and freezers are all sub- ject to the same regulatory schemes. Last week, the Biden regulators an- nounced fuel efficiency requirements for cars, minivans and light trucks of 49 mpg by 2026. New cars are already more fuel-efficient than ever before, and the Trump rules had the require- ment rising to 32 mpg over four years. That wasn't enough progress for Transportation Sec- retary Pete Buttigieg. "Mayor Pete" hates any car with a combustible engine. At his press conference an- nouncing the strict mileage rules, he assured us this would save motorists money. But if it's such a great financial ben- efit, Pete, why do you have to man- date it? But here's the other part of the sto- ry that the greenies won't tell: The new rules won't reduce pollution lev- els much. This is because the higher fuel standards can raise the price of a new car by $1,000 to $ 3,000. So to save money, families keep their old- er gas guzzlers on the road longer. Congrats to the White House: Your new pollution standards may actu- ally mean higher, not lower, tailpipe emissions. It gets worse. The primary way au- to companies comply with strict fuel standards is by making cars lighter. Get the family out of a minivan and into a Ford Fiesta. But our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute note that lighter cars are more dan- gerous and lead to more fatalities. So the Biden administration is will- ing to spill more blood on the highways to save gas. What humanitarians! The new draconian fuel standards are higher than what former President Barack Obama request- ed and even higher than what the National High- way Traffic Safety Admin- istration and the Environ- mental Protection Agency recommended. And under the rules, auto companies that fail to meet the standards can buy emission credits for tens of millions of dollars from oth- er auto companies — like Tesla. What's the real goal here? Obvious- ly, make fuel standards so unachiev- able that everyone has to buy an elec- tric car. But, of course, many low and middle-income families can't afford the higher costs for Tesla, so they will henceforth ride on one of Pete's elec- tric buses. How is this progress? These rules are designed to save the planet, but most people just want to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and they want to choose their car rather than having Biden choose for them. If it seems like Big Brother is watching you, you're not paranoid. He is looking over your shoulder. So keep your showers short and your air con- ditioner off, and stop driving around in that gas-guzzling family car. Violent crime, like the price of gas, is rising. Not everyone is expe- riencing this crime wave in the same way. For some, it's a distant issue experienced by other people some- where else. For others, it's a daily life-threatening concern. We parsed the FBI's crime data from 2011 to 2020 (the most recent data available) and found that A fri- can Americans bear an increasingly large share of the harm from crime. A frican American offenders, mean- while, are committing an increasing- ly large share of violent crimes. For other racial groups, the num- bers are either decreasing (in the case of both white victims and of- fenders), increasing by much small- er amounts, or holding constant. CRIME BY THE NUMBERS According to federal crime data, the number of violent crimes has in- creased by almost 50 percent over the last 10 years. In 2011, the FBI reported 314,907 violent offenses. In 2020, there were 640,836. The most striking figure in the da- ta is the spike in reported homicides, which tripled from 3,549 offenses in 2011 to 10,440 offenses in 2020. The picture that federal crime da- ta provide is bad, but the reality of crime in the United States is even worse. The FBI's data is not com- plete. It relies on local law enforce- ment agencies across the country to voluntarily share their local data with the FBI. Not all do. In 2020, nearly 3,000 law enforce- ment agencies around the country opted not to send the FBI their crime data, leaving 14.8 percent of law en- forcement agencies, and the crimes committed in their respective juris- dictions, unaccounted for in the Na- tional Incident-Based Reporting Sys- tem. In truth, violent crime—especially homicide—is worse than the Nation- al Incident-Based Reporting System statistics show. According to other sources, the number of homicides in 2020 was more than dou- ble what those statistics report: 21,750. However high the raw numbers are, the up- ward trend is disturbing. For most types of violent crime tracked by the FBI, the number of offenses has more than doubled in the last 10 years. The number of police officers killed feloniously is rising too. In 2021, 73 were murdered, a 20 -year record for the amount of of- ficers killed in the line of duty. The increase in crime, though drastic, has not been steady over the course of the past decade. America witnessed much larger spikes in vi- olent crime in 2020, especially ho- micide, than any of the previous 10 years. WHO SUFFERS? Although the National Inci- dent-Based Reporting System is not complete, it provides useful insights into who suffers from and who com- mits crime because it tracks demo- graphic data about both sets of peo- ple. We utilized the FBI's crime data to compare victim statistics to deter- mine which groups have been most impacted by the rise in violent crime. Factoring out the cases in which the race of the victim was unknown, we calculated who has borne the brunt of the crime wave. For this analysis, violent crime in- cludes assault, homicide, and sex of- fenses. We found that the increase in these crimes has fallen hardest on black people. From 2011 to 2020 the percent- age of violent crime victims who were black increased by 3.2 percent to reach a peak of 32.7 percent in 2020. By contrast, the percentage of total victims who were white steadi- ly declined from 69.1 percent to 64.7 percent over the same period. For Native Ameri- cans and for Asians, the changes were small- er. For the former, the percentage increased by 0.3 percent to com- pose 1.1 percent of all victims. The latter saw an increase of 0.4 per- cent to compose 1.2 percent of victims in 2018, which held constant through 2020. When we look at homicide spe- cifically, we see similar trends. The percentage of total victims who were black rose 2.9 percent to 54.4 percent in 2020. For white victims, the per- centage fell 3.5 percent to 43.3 per- cent over the same period. Again, with Native Americans and Asians, the changes were much smaller. For the former, the percentage in- creased 0.4 percent to 1.1 percent. For Asians, the rate increased by 0.4 percent to a high of 1.4 percent in 2018, and then fell by 0.4 percent back to the 2011 rate of 1 percent in 2020. The most significant changes, therefore, were that black people represent an increasing share of vio- lent crime victims, and white people a smaller share. It's true that we're dealing in relatively small percent- ages (less than 5 percent), but when you consider that the number of vio- lent crimes has more than doubled, you realize that these increases are significant. The true size of the problem is made starker when we consider that A frican Americans make up only 14.2 percent of the total population (including multiracial populations who identify as black "in combina- tion" with another race), but 32.7 per- cent of all violent crime victims and Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore Biden wants to regulate everything Heritage Viewpoint By GianCarlo Canaparo Who suffers the most from crime? See BAKERY on page 7 See CRIME on page 7 See ADMIT on page PB