Tooting My Own Horn

James Joinder has given me greatly appreciated praise at the Outside the Beltway blog, reacting to a post of Ezra Klein at the American Prospect's blog which in turn cited a blog post of mine called Against Homeownership (emphasis added):

Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today’s NYT that it’s time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. . . .

Anyway, I see from Ezra’s “link blog” that James Surowiecki wrote almost exactly the same article for the New Yorker back in March. Better yet, Andrew Oh-Willeke wrote all of this in a May 2006 blog post, before the subprime lending crisis hit, putting him way ahead of the curve.

Klein, Surowiecki, and Oh-Willeke all note that easy lending exacerbated these issues, since so many people are now mortgaged up to their eyeballs, buying ever-bigger homes, and now feeling the crunch as the economy has slowed down. Back in the days when one had to put 20 percent or more down to buy a home, people were much more insulated from these effects.

Both the American Prospect's blog and Outside the Beltway have orders of magnitude more traffic than my own little piece of the blogosphere.

Getting ahead of the curve on public policy issues is what this blog is all about.