Cross Post from For What its Worth - Two Barneys in One!

The post that follows is my entirely shameless (but credited) theft of content from my blogging friend Christopher Fountain who writes "For What its Worth"

We’re in the best of hands

From Best of the Web, this:

Two Barneys in One!

• “We have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about homeownership and its role in the economy. Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity–homeownership, homes–where there is not the degree of leverage that we’ve seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality, people building fiberoptic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you’re not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for homeownership.“–Rep. Barney Frank,June 27, 2005
  
  
  
• “One of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, and even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that. I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with homeownership. I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing. My efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing. I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership, and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that.”–Rep. Barney Frank, “Power Lunch,” CNBC, May 21, 2010