GOP Rejects Socialist Mortgage Rule, Biden Still Pursues ‘Equity’ Taxation

American homebuyers can breathe a little easier, at least for now. Last Friday, the House of Representatives passed a Republican-led bill to reverse President Joe Biden’s socialist mortgage rules — the latest item of his administration’s “whole-of-government equity agenda” to fight “systemic racism” and “affirmatively advance equity, civil rights, and racial justice.”

Biden’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees federally backed home mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instituted new mortgage rules on May 1 that penalize responsible homebuyers to subsidize high-risk — especially minority — borrowers. Under the new rules, borrowers with good credit scores and larger down payments have been saddled with higher monthly mortgage payments so that borrowers with poor credit scores and smaller down payments can receive better rates.

Under the new rules, a borrower with a credit score of about 640 will pay around $40 more per month on a $400,000 mortgage, and borrowers with even better credit scores or larger mortgages have seen their monthly payments increase by $100 or more (that’s $36,000 or more over the course of a 30-year mortgage).

The new rules came at a time of slowing housing markets and rising interest rates. Home sales are already depressed, and the critical spring and summer selling seasons have brought no signs of improvement.

“Subsidies for borrowers with low credit scores hurt the housing market and by extension all prospective homebuyers,” warned David P. Goldman, a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and former head of fixed income research at Bank of America, when asked to comment on the new rules.

“When the Clinton administration forced banks to lower mortgage lending standards in 1998, it set in motion a housing bubble with its liars’ loans, 5 percent down mortgages, and other abuses that benefited middle-class home-flippers rather than minorities,” Goldman continued. “The Biden administration’s $3 trillion of handouts in 2021 set in motion an inflation that priced homes out of the reach of tens of millions of Americans, especially families with modest means and less-than-perfect credit. This measure is unfair, harmful to the housing market, and an insult to the vast number of Americans hurt by the administration’s economic policy.”

Republican Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., a cosponsor of the bill, gave Biden the benefit of the doubt by suggesting he might be “unaware of what the [FHFA] policy really does.” This, of course, is utter nonsense. The new FHFA rules are merely Biden’s latest foray into the redistributionist politics of “racial justice,” and if the House bill clears the Senate, he very well may veto it.

Biden and BLM’s Greater Plan for ‘Racial Justice’

Biden and the Democrats have redefined equality to mean rewarding imprudence and punishing people who have followed the rules of our financial system. Under this twisted definition, redistribution of wealth becomes both a way to solidify political power and remake society. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) have already proven just how successful brazen attempts to extort money can be. BLM demanded redistribution, and the Biden administration, which rode into the White House with BLM’s help, has obliged.

Lest we forget, in 2020 the BLM movement, with the help of its Democrat benefactors, culminated in the largest and most successful shakedown in American history.

During the “summer of love,” as then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan dubbed it, BLM rioters burned more than 200 cities and caused more than $2 billion in damages. A healthy civilization would have prosecuted and incarcerated them for their trouble, but “our democracy” is no such civilization. Instead, as shown by the Claremont Institute’s BLM Funding Database, corporations pledged or contributed more than $97 billion to the BLM movement and its related causes.

Incredibly, our figure is conservative; a study by McKinsey & Company, the famed consulting firm, found that corporations pledged about $340 billion to these causes. As a point of reference, that is $10 billion more than the German government says is needed to end world hunger.

BLM’s brand of racial blackmail also resulted in new private-sector policies that satisfy many of their demands. These include the acceleration of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and discriminatory hiring programs across the country.

But more importantly, BLM’s efforts informed Biden’s decision to center his administration’s activities on “equity” and “racial justice.”

More Racial Socialism

An early example of Biden and the Democrats’ racial socialism came when they passed the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a $4 billion discriminatory debt relief program exclusively for black farmers.

More policies have followed, including increased federal grant funding for “police reform”; prohibitions on federal law enforcement practices disfavored by BLM; updated, impotent guidelines for federal prosecutors; enhanced career pathways solely for black entrepreneurs; the advancement of racial “equity” in education and housing; actions to combat “white supremacy” and enhance voting access for minorities and other protected classes; and the race-based appointment of federal judges.

Biden has even gone so far as to make the promotion and advancement of transgenderism and the transing of children priorities of the federal government. Both are elemental to BLM’s “intersectional” agenda, which states that the perceived injustices of various aggrieved categories of race, class, and sex coalesce.

BLM may lament behind closed doors the institutionalization of their revolutionary movement by the ruling class, but it’s hard to see the normalization of their agenda as anything other than a major victory for the radical left.

That victory has come at the expense of everyday, law-abiding Americans. Democrats seek to take Americans’ wealth and hard-earned privilege and redistribute them to their constituents, namely profligates and radical activists hellbent on undermining what remains of our constitutional order.

Ultimately, the transfer of wealth and privilege from decent Americans to degenerates punishes virtue and rewards imprudence. Yet tragically, the Democrat’s “reparative” policies have become an omnipresent part of the U.S. economy and only continue to grow in prevalence and scope. The effects of these policies are undeniably disastrous to both the economy and America’s social fabric. When will Americans finally stand up to such injustice?