Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.
So we’ve managed to get through all three presidential debates.
But although the presidential election is (thankfully) in the home stretch, did we really learn anything new about either President Barack Obama or Gov. Mitt Romney?
And more importantly, what everyone should be asking is why neither candidate refused to acknowledge the 900-pound gorillas in the room. They were there, but they got a cursory glance at best. These issues are glaring and obvious, yet it is as if they did not exist. It is the reason why many voters are still scratching their heads and asking the following questions.
Why isn’t housing the No. 1 domestic economic issue in this campaign?
Both the president and Romney spent exceedingly too much time on the national debt, when our economy starts and ends with housing. For the first time since the Great Depression, the real estate market has not pulled the economy out of recession. Structurally that is huge, because it was in fact the real estate market that caused the recession in the first place.
But more importantly, the recession was caused by greed and a confluence of people falling asleep at the switch. You have the government that has not properly regulated the banks, who have used their cozy relationship with the regulators to grow larger and more powerful as our nation’s leaders stood idly by.
And now you are left with entire industries, including Wall Street, effectively overshadowing the role of government. At times it seems like moral character has been checked at the foot of Wall Street.
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