Sometimes it’s my accent – or what I refer to as my lack of accent – that gives me away as an outside. Other times the subject comes up naturally. Whatever the trigger, whenever I mention to native or established Louisville residents that I only recently moved here, the conversation that follows is identical.

“Oh,” he or she says with surprise. “Do you have family here?”

“No.”

“Oh,” he or she replies, confused. “What brought you here then?”

The father and son Paul duo, Ron and Rand, have been pointing to the Federal Reserve's low interest rates, primarily under the Bush administration, as the primary factor in creating the housing bubble. If we do some root cause analysis on this, we find that the Fed's low interest rates were a contributing factor, but they were not the only contributing factor, and they were also not even the primary factor.

Here in The Arena, we like to give our readers a chance to hear both sides of public policy issues.  Brother Keith Rouda just finished giving us an interesting series of articles about “What McConnell won’t tell you about unemployment,” in which he attempts to put a bit of lipstick on President Obama’s pig of an economy.  With detailed charts and some snarky hyperbole, Rouda characterizes Senator Mitch McConnell’s “…utter lack of concern for the unemployed,” and opines that “Their suffering does not keep Senator McConnell awak

One thing that needs to be noted, and which makes it easier to understand McConnell's utter lack of concern for the unemployed, is that unemployment has not been distributed equally throughout the economy. The unemployed didn't vote Republican even before they were unemployed.