American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Of 2009

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Mr. ENZI. We need to pass a bill that will fix housing first. We recognized the problem about a year and a half ago, but Congress has not focused on the housing piece of that and come up with a solution that will work to fix housing.

``Fix Housing First,'' the slogan the Senator came up with, I appreciate the efforts of the Senator from Tennessee and the understanding that he has of this and the ability to pull people together. I thank Senator Ensign for all of the work he has done on a substitute bill. I particularly thank the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Isakson, for an idea that he has seen work before and knows will work again and has done the math on it to update it to today. But we have to fix housing first. That is what started the problem, that is what is continuing the problem, that is what has tightened the pocketbooks of Americans.

A realtor from Buffalo, WY, was in my office yesterday. He said the banks do have some money, that they had made 50 loans, they were processing 50 loans at the moment. He said, unfortunately, only two of those were for house sales. The rest of them were all refinancing as the interest rates have come down.

Even people who can afford to buy a house are not buying a house because they do not know where the bottom is in the housing market. So until we do something to put a bottom in the housing market and assure people who have bought houses as part of their retirement that their value is not going to go clear through the floor, America is not going to recover from this. People are not going to start spending. It is not Government spending that solves the problem, it is individual spending that solves the problem. And the individuals have stopped spending.

Government money spends twice, circulates twice; private money circulates seven times. We have to get the private money, the individual money, the personal money, back into the economy again, and that will make a difference.

The crisis began with the decline of housing prices in our Nation, a rising tide of foreclosures from homeowners who could no longer afford to make mortgage payments. The decline in the housing market sent shockwaves through our financial system as everybody realized their triple-A-rated investments looked more like junk bonds. With banks unwilling to lend against assets of an unknown value, our credit market came grinding to a halt. That is where we are today.

Now, the original plan of TARP was to buy toxic loans, to get those out of the market, to stabilize the banks. That did not happen. When we work in a hurry to pass something around here, particularly if it deals with a lot of dollars, we can often wind up in a different direction than where we thought we were going. Right now this bill is not focused on housing. It needs to be focused on housing, and focused on housing first.

Government spending by itself will not solve the problem. We cannot spend our way out of it. We have tried that before. We tried it in the 1930s. Government interference did not help. So we need to take some of this money and devote it to stemming foreclosures, invigorating the housing market, and getting our financial institutions and individual investors to step back into the market without fear.

I have a lot more I would like to say, but I know our time is limited. I would like the Senator from Tennessee to be able to conclude this discussion, conclude the beginning of the long discussion I hope will put housing first. Until we solve housing first, we do not have a solution.

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