THE CLINTONS’ POST-BLUE FLOP: The Greatest Failure of Democratic Social Policy.

A new study has found that it would take two hundred and twenty-eight years for black families to accumulate the same amount of wealth that white families have now, if current policy prescriptions remain in place. . . .

No program epitomized the boomer progressive synthesis better than the efforts to increase black homeownership launched by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Using the power of Fannie Mae and a flexible mortgage market, instructions went out to help get more black and minority families in homes of their own.

There is nothing wrong with the idea in many ways. Home ownership has been the foundation of middle class prosperity and wealth accumulation for many American families: $12.5 trillion in home equity, most of it held by middle class households, provides financial security, dignity and stability to millions of American families. I have written at length about how the owner occupied home replaced the owner-occupied farm as the central institution of American life in the 20th century.

Family farms produced wealth. Homes produce debt. The program to promote homeownership failed because it confused causation and correlation, as summed up in Reynolds’ Law:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

But when you subsidize things, there are glorious opportunities for graft. And when you talk about blacks being sent “to the back of the bus” — a practice that ended years before I was born — you’re not engaged with today’s realities.