How are you doing financially and economically? Are others doing as well?

How about a little check up?

As you read the New York Times excerpt - copy the link for the full article - you should imagine a 20 year roller coaster ride.

The carnival that runs this ride: "Government Housing Policy."  What creates the thrills - the turns, drops and sudden stops - is mostly from the economic distortions such government policy created.

What I see promoted today are policy prescriptions that overwhelmingly involve more of the same government based solutions.  Why?

When are the government caused thrill ride distortions going to finally stop?  PB
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From the New York Times:

The Great American Dream, Still Deferred

The housing market has shown signs of life recently...

But recall where the market has been over the last 20 years and you’ll start to see a less cheerful picture.

...from a longer perspective, it appears that the housing market, as it stands now, isn’t stable or sustainable.

It is, arguably, still on artificial life support.

Return for a moment to November 1994.

That’s when President Bill Clinton told the National Association of Realtors that many more Americans should own their own homes, because homeownership went “to the heart of what it means to harbor, to nourish, to expand the American dream.”

He called on the nation to embark on a public-private effort to lift the homeownership rate, which then stood at just above 64 percent...

The housing market is now much improved. But the trauma of the public-private housing industry isn’t entirely over.

That is evident in a startling statistic reported last month by the Census Bureau: The homeownership rate dropped all the way to 63.9 percent at the end of 2014.

That’s lower than it was when Mr. Clinton said homeownership was too low...
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Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/business/the-great-american-dream-still-deferred.html