Two items caught my attention.

1. A front-page story on the prospects for requiring higher down payments on mortgages. The story is all about how horrible this would be. It makes extensive use of quotes from an organization called the Center for Responsible Lending, which is an Orwellian name. The story does not say that “responsible lending” produced a housing bubble and a crash, resulted in millions of foreclosures, and wiped out the savings of millions of other borrowers who did not turn in the keys to their lenders.

I wish that the Post would have balanced their reporting by including some of my testimony. Or quoted from my written testimony.

2. In the Outlook section, Maya MacGuineas looks at the prospects for a long-term budget that avoids a fiscal crisis. She discusses the Ryan plan and the Bowles-Simpson plan.

It seems that the center and the right are engaged on this issue, but the left has become self-marginalizing. When your fiscal Titanic is headed toward the iceberg, most people want you to propose a plan that changes course. Merely screaming “Don’t turn right!” is not sufficient.