There are so many terrible parts of the housing bill being debated again in the Senate this week, but we’ll follow the lead of the Wall Street Journal and focus on just one: “affordable housing allocations.” We’ve documented before how groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) have been trying to establish a fund like this for decades and the WSJ details how the current versions of both House and Senate bills would accomplish this:
Mr. Dodd creates an annual tax of 4.2 basis points on the mortgages that Fan and Fred purchase each year. Initially this money will go to finance losses resulting from the bill’s bailout of refinanced mortgages. But by 2012 most of the cash from this tax will be directed to the new “affordable housing” funds. Mr. Frank applies a 1.2 basis-point tax on the value of all the loans Fan and Fred hold or have guaranteed, to collect roughly the same amount of money. The annual windfall here could amount to more than $600 million at the start, growing to perhaps $1 billion or more, depending on how fast the companies grow.
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Democrats claim the bill has ample protection against money going for electioneering and lobbying, but it will surely go to activists who promote ever-more taxes and spending. We see nothing in either the House or Senate bills to prevent money from flowing to Acorn, the left-wing activist outfit that was infamous for its bare-knuckle politics even before eight of its employees pleaded guilty in April to election fraud in St. Louis.
Michelle Malkin notes that ACORN has also been busy in Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) home state. From the Las Vegas Journal Review:
ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, claims to have collected 60,000 new voter registrations in Clark County since February. The group, which works to promote the interests of lower-income people, is aiming for 100,000 by Labor Day.
Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he has never seen such a deluge. “The biggest year we ever had was 2004. That year, we processed almost 300,000 (voter) applications — 291,000, to be exact. We’re running double that rate right now.”
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Lomax said while he supports the goal of getting more people registered to vote, he sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.