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President Barack Obama has tried to prop up the housing market by helping people stay in their homes, even though they're still overwhelmed with mortgage debt. This is the latest in a long series of government interventions intended to promote homeownership.

But propping up the housing market has only prolonged the housing slump — a depressing fact brought home by the recent dismal home-sales reports.

So what to do?

Perhaps Obama could learn a lesson from our neighbors to the north. Canada, after all, didn't have a housing bubble. What explains the difference?

For decades, the U.S. has actively promoted homeownership through a raft of programs: generous mortgage interest tax breaks, subsidized loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan guarantees, limits on what banks can repossess when a borrower defaults and so on.

The result has been an increase in homeownership, true, but it's also convinced far too many people to buy homes who couldn't afford them, helping to unrealistically push up home prices, which inevitably led to the subsequent collapse.

Even now, with interest rates near zero, millions continue to struggle to make mortgage payments, making it likely that the number of mortgage defaults will increase when interest rates rise. That means more homes will be offered by individual homeowners and banks with an urgent need to sell, depressing home prices.

Contrary to popular belief, a home isn't a good investment for everyone. First of all, it's imprudent for people of limited means to have virtually everything tied up in a single asset such as a home, whose value can go down as well as up. The bills are never-ending. For many, owning a home makes it almost impossible to save money for anything else.

And when people get government help to make their mortgage payments, they still have more debt and housing-related expenses than they can handle. In such circumstances, it's almost impossible to save money for the future.

Until the affected homes have been transferred to people who can afford the costs and risks of homeownership, those homes will hang over the market and continue depressing prices, as we're seeing now. When the government steps in to keep financially stretched people in their homes, it simply delays inevitable adjustments.

What's needed isn't more government involvement to help to prop up homeownership, but less. And if you don't think so, look at what's happened in Canada. More Canadians (68 percent) than Americans (66 percent) own their homes, yet the Canadian government has interfered very little in the private housing market.

• Canada doesn't have an income tax deduction for mortgage interest. Nor is there a tax advantage to converting home equity into debt.
• In Canada, mortgages aren't issued without verification of employment and income.
• Unlike Americans, Canadians cannot walk away from their homes without serious consequences — Canadian mortgages are generally full recourse, which means a bank can attach an individual's other assets and wages/salaries if necessary to pay the deficiency in the event of a mortgage default.
• Canada has nothing like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, subsidizing subprime mortgages on a gigantic scale.
• Nor has Canada had anything comparable to the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act that promotes political influence over mortgage lending decisions.

The principal Canadian intervention in the housing market is to require that people buy mortgage insurance if their down payment is less than 25 percent of the purchase price.

As a result of these policies, in Canada people generally buy a home when they can afford it. Canadians tend to have significantly more equity in their homes than Americans do.

The Canadian housing market has been remarkable for its long-term stability. Occasional fluctuations have mainly reflected local circumstances, such as the oil-driven housing booms in Calgary and Edmonton, and the waves of Chinese money that have flowed into Vancouver.

Obama should end government interference that does much to prolong the housing slump. He should stop trying to prop up the housing market and let inevitable adjustments take place, so we can get through hard times as quickly as possible — enabling a genuine housing recovery to begin.

Eldorado Gold Corp., Canada’s fifth- largest producer by market value, offered C$3.4 billion ($3.2 billion) in stock for Australia’s Andean Resources Ltd., which said it’s in talks for a rival transaction.

You may notice a few changes around here. This marks the launch of The Tipsheet, Townhall.com's blog where you can come to get up-to-the-minute news, views and analysis from some of the best writers today. We're all per

A production platform caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico this morning 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay, Louisiana. Fortunately, according to early reports, the 13 workers on the platform survived the scare, but rescue crews took the workers to the hospital for precautionary measures.

What exploded was not a drilling rig (like in the instance of the BP spill) but a production platform. AP reports that the shallow-water platform was not producing oil at the time of the explosion, although the well does normally produce approximately 58,800 gallons of oil and 900,000 cubic feet of gas per day. Although an official for Mariner, the company that operates the rig, reported that no oil is leaking from the platform and they properly shut the well, a thin oil sheen was present. The latest speculation is that the sheen may be from spilled petroleum from the production platform.

Without a doubt this is a different case than BP’s Macondo well blowout that leaked over 200 million gallons of oil into the water—with BP’s posing a much bigger environmental and economic challenge. If anything, the silver lining from Mariner’s production platform fire is that their response in terms of closing the seven collection wells and evacuation of the 13 crew members seems to have been professionally and successfully carried out.

Figuring out what caused the fire should be a priority for Mariner and regulators, but this shouldn’t be used as justification for the drilling moratorium. We need to recognize that offshore oil drilling is still an important national and economic priority. Energy is the lifeblood of the American economy, and oil is a significant part of our country’s energy portfolio, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. Offshore drilling provides about one-third of the U.S.’s domestic oil. These much-needed sources off our coastal waters have the potential to provide energy to every aspect of the U.S. economy at a time when fuel shortages that lead to increased energy prices can mean death to struggling industries.

As rare as these occurrences are, the clear reality is that rig and platform fires that threaten human safety and can cause significant environmental damage cannot keep occurring. We need to transition to a system that promotes safety and allows drilling to continue instead of piling on regulations that make it unnecessarily and prohibitively expensive to drill of America’s coasts. An important part of that effort should be liability reform for the secondary costs that stem from offshore oil and gas accidents.

The current system places a $75 million cap for the responsible party for these costs. Liability costs above $75 million up to $1 billion are funded by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (OSLTF). The OSLTF is financed by an eight-cent-per-barrel tax on imported and domestic oil. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 stipulates different liability limits for different oil and gas operations.

This system distorts risk of oil and gas operations in two fundamental ways. The artificially low cap of $75 million established 20 years ago does not fully or directly capture the risk of offshore operations. Secondly, rather than placing responsibility with the liable company, the OSLTF shifts responsibility to the entire industry and, ultimately, the federal government, thereby reducing the incentive for individual companies to operate safely.

Although the fire on the Mariner production platform was not a result of the liability system, a new system is necessary that better promotes safe offshore drilling operations.

Congress should reform the OSLTF and remove the $75 million liability cap, replacing it with a new system that accurately assesses the risks of offshore oil and gas operations and appropriately assigns those risks to industry operators. Companies should demonstrate to federal regulators an ability to insure against the liability risk associated with specific offshore oil and gas operations (exploration, extraction, and transportation, etc.) in federal waters. Private risk assessors would determine liability coverage requirements for specific activities, and federal regulators would certify that liability requirements are met. The means for meeting liability coverage requirements would not be limited but may include self-insurance, insurance pools, dedicated assets, or private insurance policies.

The federal government would create a private, tiered insurance framework and administrative process to manage claims. The central element of the insurance framework would be a private and voluntary pooled insurance fund for claims above $1 billion. The claims process would ensure that legitimate claims are paid fully and efficiently while protecting responsible parties from frivolous lawsuits. This is a system that would better align risk and behavior and enhance the safety of America’s offshore oil and gas operations.

Krauthammer about sums it up.

There are only three things Mrs. Mao Tse Tung could be: 1) A true believer. 2) A liar. 3) Incredibly self-deceived. 4) Ignorant of the facts.What do you think?

CNN host Kiran Chetry does everything she can malign Palin and promote the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Joseph Gross.Not only does Chetry read the language of this anonymous, foul-mouthed Sarah slanderer,...

If at first you don’t succeed, change the message. That’s the lesson learned when it comes to the new trillion dollar health law passed this spring.

One of the central advocacy groups who pushed for the Obamacare recently held a confidential ”messaging” conference call with the progressive movement where they revealed the results of extensive polling on the new law. Remember when the left was confident their controversial health care vote would soon be cheered by the public? The thinking was that Jane and John Doe simply needed more time to understand the two and half thousand page bill, because the year-long health care debate wasn’t enough time for them to get a grasp on it.

The left might not want to hold their breath while waiting for the public to applaud their bill. That’s because the people know this bill better than progressives do. In fact, just yesterday the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll reported that favorability of the bill dropped to 43% in August. The professional left has now realized this and thus the reason for the advocacy group’s hush-hush “messaging” call.

It’s important to note what the left was told on the call not to say when speaking to Americans: “Don’t say the law will reduce costs and deficits.”

Read that again.

We were repeatedly promised that one of the best parts of this bill was that it would lower the national debt in the long term. It doesn’t take a health policy expert or an economist to understand why this can’t be. A simple logic test will do: how can we put 16 million more people on Medicaid and yet save money?

Answer: we can’t. Americans old and young knew it all along, while the left hoped they would forget thanks to a marketing blitz after the bill passed that was on par with the ‘85 Bears defense. Look for progressives to audible away from this deeply unpopular piece of legislation this fall and talk about something – anything – but their landmark health care bill.

The problems with the fundamental structure of the new health care law are obvious.  First, the primary vehicle for increased coverage is Medicaid expansion.  Sixteen million individuals, 650,000 in Illinois, will be forced onto Medicaid, the joint federal-state partnership to cover low-income individuals.  These individuals will have trouble finding access to physicians and services and will be forced to seek care in prohibitively expensive emergency departments, increasing the cost of care to the federal government, states and privately-insured individuals.  This coverage expansion will not guarantee access to quality health care services.

Next, the federal government will provide $200 billion in annual subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance.  The funding comes from cuts to Medicare that will create problems in access to hospitals similar to those recently observed by physicians, according to Medicare’s own actuaries.  Additional funding will come from taxing individuals’ health insurance for the first time in history, but not until 2018. Instead of reforming the system, bending the health care cost curve and making health care more affordable to individuals, families and small-businesses, the left shifted costs onto the federal government and away from care for seniors. This approach is short-sighted and will continue to strain the budgets of individuals and families, and – to a greater extent – state and federal governments.

What’s needed is not a new message, but rather an incremental approach focused on lowering health care costs. We should expand health savings accounts, the fastest growing insurance coverage option for Americans, which have proven successful in both the public and private sectors. Forcing insurance companies to compete across state lines will help lower costs as well, and my AARP-endorsed bill to reduce fraud, waste and abuse in Medicare is a no-brainer.

PS:  I also keep a daily record on Twitter (#218hcr) and my website, Roskam.house.gov, about the many reasons we need to repeal this flawed healthcare bill and replace it with commonsense reforms that lower costs first and foremost, thereby making insurance more affordable for people to purchase.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R) represents the Sixth District of Illinois.

The views expressed by guest bloggers on the Foundry do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heritage Foundation.

Diane Katz, an accomplished policy analyst from Detroit, has joined The Heritage Foundation as a research fellow in regulatory policy.

According to a new Pew Hispanic Center report, illegal immigration has dropped by almost two-thirds in the past ten years. The numbers increased, but slowed from 2000 to 2007, while the numbers dropped by 300,000 from 2007-2009.

This is not a surprising trend. The Department of Homeland Security announced in early 2010 that the illegal population in the United States had dropped from 11.6 to 10.8 million from 2008-2009. The fledgling economy coupled with the institution of increased enforcement efforts during the Bush years have pushed illegals inside the United States to go home, while encouraging those thinking of entering illegally to think again.

The real message to these statistics, however, isn’t just that the population numbers are going down but that this data undermines a key argument of amnesty advocates. The amnesty crowd has built its case for “earned legalization” (aka amnesty) on the premise that the immigrant community inside the U.S. was largely immobile and highly rooted here, and that even with increased pressure through immigration enforcement, there was little likelihood that they would return to their home countries. They take it one step further and assert that the only solution is to let illegals have a path to citizenship.

With 300,000 individuals leaving in a period of two short years as a result of the economy and increased enforcement (enforcement that even the Obama Department of Homeland Security has touted as a success story), it is a tough-sell to say that the only option left is an amnesty. In fact, as opposed to enforcement, amnesty would make problems worse by simply encouraging more illegal immigration.

Despite real evidence that enforcement and economic disincentives have a major impact on illegal populations, the Obama White House has taken steps as of late to decrease, rather than increase enforcement. Changes to the 287(g) program that trained state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law, an inherent border security policy, and the all out abandonment of several worksite enforcement policies, coupled with an assault on Arizona’s immigration law were bad enough. But now the Administration has taken to dismiss deportation cases against non-criminal illegal immigrants, allowing them to stay in the United States.

As my colleague Matt Mayer points out, “Instead of constantly seeking ways to evade, skirt, and ignore the immigration laws that are on the books, the Obama Administration needs to simply execute the laws—as is its constitutional duty—while looking to solve the immigration problem in a way that discourages more illegal immigration, maintains security, and promotes the economy.”