Blaming the poor?

This has been the response of liberals to conservative criticism of loan practices that caused institutions to make loans to those who could not afford them. Thus Clarence Page who is normally pretty sensible tries to push the problem back over onto deregulation, but the fact is that there is no amount of regulation that can force someone to pay what they cannot afford.

One of the smartest lawyers I ever knew used to say there is nothing dumber than suing someone who does not have any money, because you wind up as the only person in the suit with something to lose. The lending of money to those who cannot afford it falls in that category too. It does neither the lender nor the borrower any good.

Page is on better ground in criticizing Fannie and Freddie, but he glosses over the fact that it was Democrats who pushed their bad policies and then refused to regulate the institutions.

He ends with this unsupported howler:

...

CRA is a punching bag for the right along with ACORN, a left-progressive organization that has been pushing for deregulation and once was represented in a voting rights case by a young lawyer named Barack Obama. That's politics. But neither the CRA nor ACORN caused the housing market's crash. In fact, they tried to prevent it.

So he goes from blaming deregulation to defending an organization that pushed for it. He produces not one shred of evidence that ACORN did anything to prevent the crash in the market and he ignores all their intimidation efforts ACORN used to force lenders into giving the bad loans to begin with. The column does not discuss ACORN's latest vote fraud efforts.