Barney Frank: The poor should rent, not buy

Barney Frank, former chief booster of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now conveniently says they should be disbanded.

“I believe the remedy is abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their present form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” Frank said.

Furthermore, he told Big Think that the poor should be encouraged to rent, not buy. That’s a good idea. Of course, he never acknowledges his own hand in the mortgage crisis. According to Frank, the house buy-up among long income Americans was the fault of Republicans who “killed the rental housing programs.”

[Hat tip: Daniel Indiviglio]

*          *          *

Two years ago at a forum in Michigan, human irritant Michael Moore attacked state subsidies to local filmmakers:

“These are large multinational corporations — Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch — that own these studios,” said Moore at the Traverse City event. “Why do they need our money, from Michigan, from our taxpayers, when we’re already broke here? I mean, they play one state against another, and so they get all this free cash when they’re making billions already in profits. What’s the thinking behind that?”

That’s a great question, and possibly one Moore can now answer: Since his appearance at the forum, he has both applied for and been approved for that very same subsidy.