WSJ skewers Barney Frank and Sheila Bair

The Wall Street Journal skewers Congressman Barney Frank and FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair:

What do you do if you've spent your career encouraging mortgage loans to people who can't repay them? Barney Frank's answer is to grill federal officials on why they aren't preventing foreclosures. Infuriated at the difficulty of modifying mortgages, the Beltway crowd doesn't understand that such contracts weren't designed to let people live in houses they can't afford.

Still, at a recent hearing of his Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank received encouraging words from FDIC Chair Sheila Bair. She outlined her ballyhooed plan to prevent an estimated 1.5 million foreclosures by the end of 2009. ...

What we have here is another uncharted voyage into the land of taxpayer risk, and for little economic gain. We can only hope that news of the FDIC program doesn't encourage more people to stop paying their mortgages as they await rescue from Sheila Bair.