Some suggestion that this post was unfair to Barack Obama. An, certainly, this August 28 statement on Bush’s Iran / mushroom cloud remarks from Obama doesn’t sound like the words of a man looking to beat the drums of war:

There is an eerie echo to the President’s words today. Five years ago, he made a misleading case to the American people that the trail to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden somehow led through Iraq, and too many in Washington followed without asking the hard questions that should have been raised. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that failure of candor and judgment, and the President is using the politics of fear to continue a wrong-headed policy. It’s time to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney strategy and conventional Washington thinking, remove our combat troops from Iraq, mount a long overdue surge of diplomacy, and focus our attention on a resurgent al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Similarly, one plausible (albeit frightening) interpretation of what’s happening here is that the Bush administration is blocking legislative efforts at an approach to Iran centered around sanctions and carrots specifically in order to be able to proclaim that the diplomatic approach “failed” and military strikes are needed. So, okay, I don’t think Obama’s trying to grease the skids for war. At the same time, his Daily News op-ed did get the head and subhead “Hit Iran where it hurts: Democratic presidential hopeful takes a get-tough stance against tyrant of Tehran.” Writers don’t pick their own headlines, but you’ve got to imagine that the campaign signed off on that framing on some level. What game is Obama playing? Well, according to the Jewish Week:

Capitol Hill insiders say Obama genuinely believes in the necessity of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions — but also that his championing of the Iran divestment measure is part of a concerted effort to reassure Jewish voters that began with his March speech to a Chicago gathering of AIPAC.

“There are soft spots in his campaign,” said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn. “He doesn’t have a long record; he got negative attention for suggesting he would negotiate with Syria and Iran. So he wants to stake out a piece of the Mideast question where he knows he’s not going to get any Jewish flak.”

Basically, there seems to be one policy here, namely that curbing Iranian nuclear ambitions is an important priority that needs to be accomplished through a greater commitment to diplomacy on both the carrots (willing to hold talks without preconditions) and sticks (sanctions) front, and that a war with Iran would be a bad idea. But there also seem to be two messages here, one about a “get-tough stance” that’s supposed to “reassure Jewish voters” and another about an “eerie echo” that’s aimed at other people. I’m not sure how long an Iran message divided against itself can stand. I’m also not sure what the evidence is that Jewish voters (as opposed to AIPAC board members) have unusually hawkish views on Iran.

Sommer Mathis interviewed by Garrett Graf:

What makes Washington special? Every day you can meet someone who turns out to be the smartest, most well-informed person you’ll ever know on a given subject. It’s like living in the best university in the world but without all those essays to write.

Indeed. On the other hand, Washington also kind of sucks. If you could take the people, and the whole “the government’s here and so’s your job” thing, and put it all someplace else, that’d probably be better.

Nick Confessore and Sarah Kershaw report on fraud in New York State’s largely unregulated home health care industry. I don’t know anything about that subject except what I read in their article, so you might as well read it rather than pay attention to me. This did, however, kind of leap out:

“To make someone else’s home fabulous, you need a license and your name goes in a state registry,” said Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for the state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. “But to care for someone in their home who is old and infirm, there is no central registry.”

Doesn’t it seem like at least half the problem here is that you need a license to be an interior decorator? In general, the amount of seemingly unnecessary small business regulation on a state and local level is fairly mind-boggling and one suspects that 70 percent or so of it is totally unnecessary and only serves the interests of incumbent operators looking to throw roadblocks in the path of potential competition.

Well, obviously, there are a lot of reasons a person might want to own a home. The question is less why would one want to own a home than why the country has so much public policy aimed specifically at encouraging homeownership. Roger Lowenstein’s New York Times Magazine article on the housing market doesn’t directly address this point, and neither does the chart from that article that I’ve reproduced to the left. Still, look at the chart.

The highest homeownership rates are in West Virginia, Michigan, Delaware, and Mississippi. I couldn’t say for certain, especially since I don’t know much about Delaware, but the common factor here seems to be economic stagnation leading to relatively low housing costs plus relatively small numbers of new people moving to the state. Now, it’d be dumb to say that high levels of home ownership are making Mississippi so poor (try history) or causing Michigan’s current economic woes (try to auto industry) but it does seem to indicate that boosting homeownership rates doesn’t produce any miraculous consequences.

If we didn’t subsidize howmownership, people would own less home and own more stocks and bonds instead. Some of that owning “less home” would come from people renting rather than buying, and some would come from buyers simply buying smaller houses. That’s be good for the environment, and more capital would be available for business operating in non-housing sectors. Meanwhile, I feel like if we weren’t specifically encouraging an ideology of home ownership (“American dream” and all that), you might get less of the risky behavior that seems to be causing trouble of late. I feel like there are a lot of people who would never dream of doing something so exotic as margin trading who’ve been basically willing to do the same thing with their investment in the housing market. If anything, it seems to me that we should be work at the margin to discourage people from treating their homes as speculative investment commodities.