A Nation of Moochers (33 page)

5
. Carney,
Obamanomics,
163 (see chap. 8, n. 15).

6
. Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, “Testy Conflict with Goldman Helped Push AIG to Edge,”
New York Times,
February 7, 2010.

7
. Hagan, “Tenacious G” (see “Scenes from Moocher Nation,” n. 1).

8
. Congressional Oversight Committee, “Congressional Oversight.”

9
. Hagan, “Tenacious G.”

10
. Carney,
Obamanomics,
165.

11
. Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson, “In U.S. Bailout of A.I.G., Forgiveness for Big Banks,”
New York Times,
June 29, 2010.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Congressional Oversight Committee, “Congressional Oversight.”

14
. Story and Morgenson, “In U.S. Bailout.”

15
. Congressional Oversight Committee, “Congressional Oversight.”

16
. Ibid.

17
. Ibid.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Graham Bowley, “With Big Profit, Goldman Sees Big Payday Ahead,”
New York Times,
July 15, 2009.

Chapter 12. Walk Away from Your Mortgage!

1
. David Streitfeld, “Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting,”
New York Times,
May 13, 2010.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Cassy Fiano, “Old and Busted: Paying Your Mortgage. New Hotness: Living in Foreclosure Without Paying Anything,”
HotAir.com
,
June 1, 2010,
http://www.cassyfiano.com/2010/06/old-and-busted-paying-your-mortgage-new-hotness-living-in-foreclosure-without-paying-anything
.

4
. Brett Arends, “When It’s OK to Walk Away from Your Home,”
Wall Street Journal,
February 26, 2010.

5
. Roger Lowenstein, “Walk Away from Your Mortgage!”
New York Times Magazine,
January 10, 2010.

6
. White, “Underwater and Not Walking Away” (see chap. 1, n. 11).

7
. Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “Moral and Social Constraints to Strategic Default on Mortgages,” NBER Working Paper No. 15145, July 2009.

8
. White, “Underwater and Not Walking Away.”

9
. Ibid.

10
. Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales, “Moral and Social Constraints.”

Chapter 13. No, They Didn’t Learn Anything

1
. Andrew Haughwout, Ebiere Okah, and Joseph Tracy, “Second Chances: Subprime Mortgage Modification and Re-Default,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Staff Report no. 417, December 2009, revised August 2010. See also David Streitfeld, “Defaults Rise in Loan Modification Program,”
New York Times,
April 14, 2010.

2
. Arthur Delaney and Shahien Nasiripour, “Extend and Pretend,”
Huffington Post,
August 8, 2010,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/04/extend-and-pretend-the-ob_n_668609.html
.

3
. John Leland, “New Program for Buyers, with No Money Down,”
New York Times,
September 4, 2010.

4
. Diana Olick, “Home Ownership: Do You Really Need Skin in the Game?”
CNBC.com
, September 10, 2010,
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39097208/Home_Ownership_Do_You_Really_Need_Skin_in_the_Game
.

5
. Leland, “New Program for Buyers.”

6
. David Streitfeld, “A Bold U.S. Plan to Help Struggling Homeowners,”
New York Times,
March 26, 2010.

7
. Department of the Treasury, “Housing Program Enhancements Offer Additional Options for Struggling Homeowners,” press release, March 26, 2010.

8
. Keith Hennessey, “Should Taxpayers Subsidize Underwater Homeowners?,” blog posting, March 26, 2010,
http://keithhennessey.com/2010/03/26/underwater
.

9
. Larry Kudlow, “TARP-ing the Upper Class Is an Outrage,”
National Review Online,
March 29, 2010,
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/larrykudlow/2010/03/29/tarp-ing_the_upper_class_is_an_outrage
.

10
. Hennessey, “Should Taxpayers Subsidize.”

Chapter 14. The Bank of Mom and Dad

1
. Charles J. Sykes,
50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 79.

2
. Frank F. Furstenberg, Sheela Kennedy, Vonnie C. McLoyd et al., “Growing Up Is Harder to Do,”
Contexts
, American Sociological Association, Summer 2004.

3
. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Richard A. Settersten, Jr., “On the Frontier of Adulthood: Emerging Themes and New Directions,” Network on Transitions to Adulthood, policy brief, October 2004, issue 1.

4
. Ted Mouw, “The Effect of Timing and Sequence of Choices on Young Adults’ Futures,” Network on Transitions to Adulthood, policy brief, October 2004, issue 8.

5
. Robert Schoeni and Karen Ross, “Family Support During the Transition to Adulthood,” Network on Transitions to Adulthood, policy brief, October 2004, issue 12.

6
. Anna Bahney, “The Bank of Mom and Dad,”
New York Times,
April 20, 2006.

7
. Schoeni and Ross, “Family Support.”

8
. Bahney, “The Bank of Mom and Dad.”

Chapter 15. Middle-Class Suckers

1
. Glenn Grothman, “The Government’s Message to America: Don’t Get Married,” undated, Office of Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman.

2
. Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), Federal Student Aid website,
http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/PSF.jsp
; and “Income-Based Repayment Plan,”
http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/IBRPlan.jsp
.

3
. The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Reform subsidy calculator:
http://healthreform.kff.org/SubsidyCalculator.aspx
.

4
. Janet Novack and Stephanie Fitch, “When Work Doesn’t Pay for the Middle Class,”
Forbes,
October 5, 2009.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

7
. Nancy K. Cauthen, “When Work Doesn’t Pay; What Every Policymaker Should Know,” NCCP, June 2006.

8
. Grothman, “The Government’s Message.”

9
. Cauthen, “When Work Doesn’t Pay.”

10
. Lipton, “‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud” (see chap. 5, n. 1).

11
. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “The Earned Income Tax Credit,” December 4, 2009.

12
. Ibid.

13
. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Means-Tested Programs: Report to the Ranking Minority Member, Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives,” March 2005.

14
. Novack and Fitch, “When Work Doesn’t Pay.”

15
. Kaiser Family Foundation subsidy calculator.

16
. Scott Gottlieb, “O’s Middle-Class Squeeze,”
New York Post,
March 18, 2010.

Chapter 16. Why Get a Job?

1
. Jaclyn Trop, “Landscapers Find Workers Choosing Jobless Pay,”
Detroit News,
May 10, 2010.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Cited in Alan Reynolds, “The ‘Stimulus’ for Unemployment,”
New York Post,
November 17, 2009.

4
. Lawrence H. Summers, “Unemployment,”
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics,
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Unemployment.html
. See also James M. Poterba and Lawrence H. Summers, “Unemployment Benefits, Labor Market Transitions, and Spurious Flows: A Multinational Logit Model with Errors in Classification,” NBER Working Paper No. 4434, September 1995; Martin Feldstein, “The Economics of the New Unemployment,”
Public Interest
33 (Fall 1973): 3–42; Martin Feldstein, “Why Is Productivity Growing Faster?” NBER Working Paper no. 9530, March 2003; Robert Hall, “Employment Fluctuations and Wage Rigidity,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1980): 91–141; Lawrence H. Summers,
Understanding Unemployment
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); Lawrence H. Summers, “Why Is the Unemployment Rate So Very High Near Full Employment?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1986): 339–83; and Lawrence H. Summers and Kim B. Clark, “Labor Market Dynamics and Unemployment: A Reconsideration,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1979): 13–60.

5
. Alan B. Krueger and Bruce D. Meyer, “Labor Supply Effects of Social Insurance,” National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2002.

6
. Cited in Reynolds, “The ‘Stimulus’ for Unemployment.”

7
. Robert Barro, “The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment,”
Wall Street Journal,
August 30, 2010.

Chapter 17. Mooching Off the Kids

1
. Jeremy Pelzer, “Al Simpson Speaks Out Against Debt Committee Critics, Political Climate,”
Casper Star-Tribune,
November 24, 2010.

2
. Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy, “The 19 Percent Solution: How to Balance the Budget without Increasing Taxes,”
Reason,
March 2011.

3
. The Heritage Foundation, “2010 Budget Chart Book,” Washington, D.C., 2010.
http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/PDF/All-Budget-chart-book-2010.pdf
.

4
. Riedl, “Federal Spending” (see chap. 1, n. 19).

5
. Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling, “Big Government Debt Mortgages Our Children’s Future,”
Washington Examiner,
June 21, 2010.

6
. “The Next Generation’s Debt Burden,” House Republican conference based on CBO projections,
http://www.gop.gov/policy-news/10/08/24/the-next-generations-debt-burden
.

7
. Paul Krugman, “Fiscal Scare Tactics,”
New York Times,
February 5, 2010.

8
. Ibid.

9
.
Scrivener.net
,
“Krugman Versus Krugman on Deficits and Debt—Who Can You Believe?” August 29, 2009,
http://blog.scrivener.net/2009/08/krugman-versus-krugman-on-deficits-and.html
.

10
. Paul Krugman, “A Fiscal Train Wreck,”
New York Times,
March 11, 2003.

11
. Cindy Perman, “Dying with Debt: A Dirty Little Retirement Secret,”
USA Today,
November 22, 2010.

12
. Christopher Buckley,
Boomsday
(New York: Twelve, Hatchett Book Group, 2007), ff.

13
. Riedl, “Federal Spending.”

14
. Robert J. Samuelson, “A Rail Boondoggle, Moving at High Speed,”
Newsweek,
August 24, 2009; also Robert J. Samuelson, “High-Speed Pork: Why Fast Trains Are a Waste of Money,”
Newsweek,
October 29, 2010.

15
. Riedl, “Federal Spending.”

16
. Ibid.

Chapter 18. We’re All from Starnesville Now

1
. Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged
(New York: Dutton, 1992), 660–72.

2
. Ibid., 660–61.

3
. Ibid., 662.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Ibid., 665.

6
. Ibid., 323.

7
. Ibid., 666.

8
. Ibid., 666–67.

9
. Ibid., 667.

10
. Ibid., 663–64.

11
. Ibid., 309.

12
. Ibid., 310.

Chapter 19. What’s Fair?

1
. Robert Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 168–72.

2
. Ibid., 163.

3
. Ibid., 161.

4
. Ibid., 160.

5
. Voegeli,
Never Enough,
102–3 (see chap. 1, n. 22).

6
. John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 64.

7
. Ibid., 103–4.

8
. Schmidtz,
Elements of Justice,
60 (see chap. 1, n. 2).