Open Forum: Reforming Title Insurance

In 1990, I was running for re-election with a good amount of money, and I didn't have a very well financed or strong opponent. So, I did something very few politicians do. I did a poll of 3,000 samples. I didn't ask a lot of questions about what people thought, but I did ask a lot of questions about people. I think I found 258 people in the poll who said they were on welfare. I looked at a lot of factors, but the thing that struck me is that if you were going to pick one variable to determine whether someone had a favorable impression of me, homeownership was the strongest predictor. The points I would like to make are the following: Obviously I am interested in what the budget is going to be, but I am far more interested in your effort to look at all the programs that we have added to the Department of Housing and Urban Development over the years. It would be good to take a look at them and try to determine if we have a rational set of programs, and to see to what extent these programs are efficient and actually help the people we want to help. We need to see if we could consolidate some of the programs, and see to what extent public housing is a way station on the road toward homeownership, and to what extent is it a dead end. We add new programs and we never get rid of old programs. Often they overlap or are contradictory.