Housing

The country continues to experience uncertainty and volatility in the financial markets as a result of the crisis in the mortgage industry.  Financial services companies have been hit hard.  For example, Merrill Lynch announced an $8.4 billion writedown in October, and Citigroup received a $7.5 billion infusion of cash from investors in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

For its part, Congress has been trying to help homeowners who face foreclosure or need help refinancing homes they can no longer afford.  Developments in the mortgage market are fluid and the industry began taking corrective action to mitigate problems for some subprime borrowers.  One housing advocate told The Wall Street Journal that some loan-service providers are “already freezing rates for five to seven years.” 

When many Americans think of Europe, they conjure up images of slow-moving socialist bureaucracies.  While this type of government may exist in some countries, there is a growing free market and taxpayer movement spreading throughout the continent.

In the fall of 1998, the Internet Tax Freedom Act put a moratorium on discriminatory and multiple Internet taxes on electronic commerce and access taxes at the federal, state, and local levels.  With large bipartisan support, the ban was extended in 2001 and 2004.  It expires on November 1, 2007.  Congress is considering a four-year extension.

Congress is considering changes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) as well as increasing the availability of state-sponsored insurance funds.  Both initiatives would expose taxpayers to massive costs. The Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2007, H.R. 3121, reauthorizes the NFIP for five years, increases NFIP borrowing authority, and makes updates to maximum […]

Some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.  In the case of Coconut Road in Florida, even though a member of Congress felt like wasting taxpayer dollars on a highway interchange project at Coconut Road and I-75, taxpayers in Lee County, Florida did not want and the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Commission eventually voted against.

The United States government is seriously overdue for a garage sale.  While the government is projecting a $205 billion budget deficit for Fiscal 2007 and splurging on tens of billions of dollars in wasteful programs and congressional pork-barrel spending, it also sluggishly attempts to divest itself of billions of dollars worth of derelict or obsolete federal property.