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Ben Bernanke’s Childhood Home Sold In Foreclosure

By: kowalski (Diary)  |  February 15th, 2009 at 09:49 AM  | 

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The Wall Street Journal (ht: Drudge) is reporting that the boyhood home of Ben Bernanke has been put on the block and sold in a foreclosure action. The Bernanke family sold the property more than 10 years ago and the most recent owners couldn’t make the payments. The town of Dillon, South Carolina has an unemployment rate almost twice the national average and like many other small towns in America, it is reeling from the economic downturn.

The small town that gave the Fed its chairman is suffering more than most from the financial and economic crisis he’s struggling to fix. Already hit by the long decline of the local tobacco and textile industries, Dillon County is facing a fresh assault of plant closings and layoffs that have pushed its unemployment rate to 14.2% — almost double the national average. A foreclosure wave that began in mobile-home parks is spreading to more-established neighborhoods.

Mohawk Industries has shuttered a plant that made yarn for carpeting and employed 137 people. Wix Manufacturing, a unit of Affinia Group Inc., has cut hours and a few jobs at its automotive-filter factory. Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., which makes corrugated-cardboard packaging in nearby Latta, filed for bankruptcy protection last month.

This is becoming an increasingly common story in small towns across this country. The factories are closing, the industries are moving away or going out of business, and there are more and more people becoming dependent on the government for survival. Without a genuine, long-term economic recovery plan for the United States that isn’t just a quick injection of federal money and a welfare spending spree, over the next decade more places in America are going to look like Dillon, South Carolina.

There are very stark and unpleasant choices coming in the next decade if this trend continues. There won’t be enough business investment going on to employ people to pay taxes to fund the programs that are coming down the pike, folks. The State and Federal governments still haven’t gotten the message that their spending levels need to be reduced. And families aren’t going to earn their livings and pay college tuition selling inexpensive trinkets on eBay. They’re not going to prosper ever again unless the United States finds the political will to make America the best place in the world to do business again, so that it can capture a large part of the necessary investment when capital starts moving again. If we miss it because our President and Congress are asleep at the switch, we’re in for a long, hard time.

I wish I could say that I was surprised when I read this story, but I was told more than a month ago by the director of a credit union that the foreclosure wave was just beginning. The people who are being thrown out of their homes and onto the unemployment and welfare rolls are going to have a hard time getting back on their feet unless our politicians really start taking the requirements of an economic recovery seriously.

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  • itrytobenice

    Until the morons who run this country figure that out, we will be in serious trouble.

    You can’t be unfriendly to business and think that the gov’t is going to be able to hold it all together with hopium and changium.

    • izoneguy

      http://www.thespendocrats.com/

      Current Price Tag for “Stimulus”
      $ 787,000,000,000

      The current US National Debt is
      $ 10,727,605,147,559

    • mom2oneson

      good quote!!!!

  • The_Rebel

    and the world’s, direction.

    Richard Ebeling, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1991 wrote an essay entitled “The Causes and Consequences of World War II. In that piece he wrote about how the Federal Reserve’s policy in the 1920′s was geared toward managing the economy through monetary manipulation, with the resultant crash of 1929 and Hoover’s response with even greater federal intervention and government spending. Under Roosevelt, the country was subjected to an “economic fascism”, as his administration imposed comprehensive controls and regulations on practically every aspect of economic life.

    Every country became an economic fortress, surrounded with trade barriers and economic weapons of war. The main area that differentiates that era from the current one is that there was an arms race then. We are heading again towards that total collectiviist state, with the death of limited government and individual liberty, although not in exactly the same way. If we keep printing money, prices for goods and services will increase drastically. With hyperinflation, a lifetime of savings could become almost worthless overnight. This is what happened to Germany in the 1920′s and 1930′s, leading to Hitler’s rise to power. And it was these economic conditions that were a major factor in causing World War II.

    No one is saying that all of this is presaging another war down the road. But, as the old saying goes, those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

  • izoneguy

    Obama does not want this to happen. Of course he says he does. But he is lying. Things won’t turn around until we stop Obama and then get rid of the democrats. This is the message that MUST be conveyed to the American people. Passing more spending bills will only dig our grave. I am a small business man and I hear this story over & over. Many people I know just shut down when it became apparent that Obama was going to be elected. I heard one lady – an owner of a cabinet making company say – “I will shut down my business and fire everyone before I send money to Obama to fund abortions”.

    Of course the bad news is that NAM – National Association of Manufacturers support the stimulus.

    http://www.nam.org/NewsFromtheNAM.aspx?DID={3F20CAAF-6DAD-477D-A4DD-B85BA38D1E29}

    I have been reading through the “stimulus” – show me where it helps manufacturers or small business. Obama is using the “trickle down” theory that he says does not work. He expects all these infrastructure projects will create jobs and thus some other business’s might get some work or sell products. That would be great but the dems have put in a clause about all the contracts are to be with done with union labor. That cuts out a huge base of business and sounds illegal to me?

    SO NO – the “stimulus” is NOT and it will not be stimulating to the economy in a capitalistic sense. If anything it will quash a recovery at every chance it gets.

  • Kowalski

    Another part of this crisis is that Obama being elected may have actually prolonged and deepened it. I really believe that it has, and not just for the reasons the Congressional Budget Office cited when they analyzed Porkulus.

    The other reason is that an awful lot of people in hard-hit economic areas saw Obama’s election as some kind of miracle cure: that once those evil Republicans were out of office and Change had come, all their troubles would go away. In my small town, the citizens just passed an “austerity” budget that is still $60,000 in the deficit. In response the Town is going on a crusade to collect excise taxes, and the people they’re hitting first are the handful of small businesses here. They voted on that default budget at least in part because they were looking through rose-colored glasses at how much and how quickly Obama and the Democrats were going to be able to accomplish anything of substance. I expect that a lot of municipalities around the country are like mine.

    The cold, hard truth is that what they should have done is eliminate $60,000 worth of services. It would have been hard: they would probably have had to cut back certain town functions to once a month or even once every two months. They should have really trimmed their sails. But they didn’t do that, because of Porkulus — and because of very unrealistic ideas about what Porkulus was going to do to “help.”

    The problem with this plan isn’t just the cost — it’s the absolute lack of attention it pays to the long-term changes that are necessary to truly make America more economically competitive again.

    I’m not an economist, but as a businessman I know that the only way to help businesses recover and be able hire people for long-term positions and to compete effectively is to make the climate more favorable to business — in terms of taxes, depreciation, insurance, health insurance, labor and energy costs, and regulatory and liability issues — and that is going to require Change of a sort that is almost nonexistant in this bill. Those are the only things that are going to help the economy recover over the long term. Otherwise the United States is going to continue to print money, continue to rely on band-aid fixes to structural problems, and continue to sink deeper and deeper in debt. Our standard of living will go decline and more people will be dependent on the government. Even entrepreneurs with good ideas will not be able to to move them forward without connections in the right places.

    How is that the American Way?