If the folks in Congress who are rushing to pass their housing bill really believed that they were helping homeowners rather than banks, they would set up a mechanism to keep score.

In other words, Congress should be asking how much equity, net of selling costs and excess homeownership costs (the difference between monthly ownership costs and rent) homeowners walk away with under the program. (My guess is that this number will be negative.)

That can be compared with the amount of money that the banks make by having Congress issue guaranteed mortgages. I'm confident that any serious account will show the banks get more out of this one than the homeowners. Unfortunately, Congress will probably not appropriate the money to allow for this scorekeeping.

By the way, Senator John Ensign should be proclaimed a hero of moderate-income homeowners everywhere.

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Today, David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, is testifying before Congress about the need to clamp down on entitlements (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). As everyone should know by now, the focus on "entitlements" is part of a dishonest effort to transform the country's health care crisis into a demographic problem.

Health care costs in the United States are out of control. We already pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy controls and get worse outcomes. This gap is projected to expand in the decades ahead as our costs are projected to keep rising relative to those of other countries. Because we pay for close to half of health care through the public sector (primarily Medicare and Medicaid), the health care crisis, if not addressed, will create a budget crisis. We then lump Medicare and Medicaid in with Social Security, and voila!!! We have an entitlement crisis.

Today, we also received new data on house prices, with the Case-Shiller index (the best available house price index) showing that real house prices have been falling at 26 percent annual rate over the last quarter and are now down by 19 percent over the last year.

While David Walker's testimony on entitlements and plunging house prices may seem unrelated, the latter will soon make the former completely irrelevant.

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