The housing market collapse is pulling down the entire economy, creating a credit freeze and putting hundreds of thousands of American jobs at risk. To get our economy back on track, Congress must address housing.
A housing stimulus would include a short-term incentive for qualified home buyers in the form of a meaningful tax credit coupled with a permanent low mortgage rate.
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"The government and taxpayers have an enormously strong incentive to address the housing market given that the losses to banks will not end and the economy is unlikely to stop declining until the housing market stabilizes."
R. Glenn Hubbard and Christopher Mayer
Columbia Business School
The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2008
"Homeowners across the country are losing the equity they have built up in their homes as prices continue to fall. Sales of existing homes and new construction continue to be lethargic."
Andrew Jakabovics
Associate Director, Economic Mobility Program
Center for American Progress, October 28, 2008
"This is the worst financial crisis that the U.S. and other advanced economies have experienced since the Great Depression. A stimulus package legislated only in February or March of next year — will be too late."
Nouriel Roubini
New York University Professor of Economics
Congressional Testimony, October 30, 2008
"Things connected with housing, whether it's in brick or whether it's in carpet, those businesses have shown no uptick at all."
Warren Buffet
April 2008
"A necessary condition for this crisis to end is a stabilization of home prices in the U.S."
Alan Greenspan
Congressional Testimony, October 2008
"Housing. This has been ground zero for the current financial market turmoil."
Anoop Singh
IMF Western Hemisphere director,
speech to Latin America economic conference, March 17, 2008
"At the heart of this fall's historic financial crisis lies a steep, nationwide fall in the price of homes."
Edward Glaeser
Harvard Economist, The Boston Globe
November 2, 2008
"Clearly, the system won't stabilize until house prices stabilize. ... All roads, into and out of this crisis, run through the housing market."
New York Times Editorial
November 10, 2008
"To address the housing problem, Congress and the administration should take actions that increase the current demand for housing. For a limited time, say up to the end of 2009, allow buyers to use the value of their down-payment (or some part of it) as a tax deduction."
Allan Meltzer
Carnegie Mellon Political Economy Professor
Financial Times, November 11, 2008
"The market won't really come back until you get a close to normal ratio of vacant homes, homes up for sale compared to current sales, and that's a ways off."
Warren Buffet
CNBC's Squawk Box
"Key, going forward, is the stabilization of housing prices."
Alan Mulally
Ford Motor Companies, CEO
"I have always said that the decline in the housing market is at the root of the economic downturn and our financial market stress."
Henry M. Paulson
Secretary of the Treasury
New York Times, November 18, 2008
"We're going to recommend, for example, you go right at the housing problem. We have a four-percent mortgage proposal where creditworthy homebuyers could buy down
their mortgages or save them on the average fifty-six hundred dollars a year. Let's fix housing first. That's what started all of this."
Mitch McConnell
Republican - Kentucky
Face the Nation, CBS, February 1, 2009
"I think we can do more for housing. One of the Republican proposals is to raise the seventy-five hundred tax credit we give to new homebuyers, raise it to up to
fifteen thousand, do it for all homebuyers. That's something that we look favorably upon. Getting mortgages down to four and a half percent as Senator McConnell mentioned.
That's a good idea."
Charles Schumer
Democrat - New York
Face the Nation, CBS, February 1, 2009
"So I think you have to start from scratch and reconstruct [the stimulus package] to start with the problem that created the entire cascade of events that have
occurred here, the housing collapse."
Jon Kyl
Republican - Arizona
Fox News Sunday, Fox News Channel, February 1, 2009
"Regardless of the jobs you are going to create you are not going to treat the cancer that is affecting our economy, and that is the housing problem. And that's
why we have put together a plan to solve the housing problem in the United States. And if you don't do that, whatever short term jobs you're going to put in with this stimulus
bill, it's really a spending bill, are not going to help bring us out."
John Ensign
Republican - Nevada
State of the Union with John King, CNN, February 1, 2009
"Are we doing enough to help the financial sector? Are we doing enough about housing? Because if we don't get those two right, we're not going to see the kind of
lift out of this downturn that we need."
Kent Conrad
Democrat - North Dakota
State of the Union with John King, CNN, February 1, 2009
"Housing has to be a component of this… Just this package will not fix this if we don't also do something about housing…"
John Kerry
Democrat - Massachusetts
Meet the Press, NBC, February 1, 2009
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"A strong and direct stimulus to housing demand is absolutely essential to have a timely and dependable economic recovery."
— Dwight Jaffee, professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley
