A new American reality: The government as provider

You can read the entire Internation Herald Tibune article by following the link in the clip. File this under perspective.

clipped from www.iht.com "If you're a socialist, you should be happy," said Michael Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a research institute in Washington. "But you should really wonder whether you want people's ability to pay for housing and college dependent on the motives of people in Washington." How the government came to dominate these two crucial areas of American life is - depending on one's ideological bent - a narrative of regulatory and market failure, or a cautionary tale about bureaucratic meddling in commerce. Perhaps it is both. This was the spirit in which Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, allowed banks to engineer unfathomably complicated webs of mortgage-based investments that, through the first half of this decade, sent real estate prices soaring and expanded home ownership.