Spoils sports.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

The administration's civil-rights agenda: income redistribution

"FED FINDS DISPARITIES IN MORTgage Denials," blared a Washington Post headline on October 27. The Post reported that data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council showed that "blacks and Hispanics were nearly twice as likely as whites with similar incomes to be denied credit in 1993."

But the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data did not include the credit ratings of the individuals surveyed. It didn't consider the applicants' balance sheets--had they accumulated assets when they applied for loans or were they mired in debt? The report merely compared the percentage of loans approved for people of different racial backgrounds who have similar incomes, not why people who were denied loans didn't get them.

To civil-rights advocates, this information appears irrelevant. Even though the number of loans to blacks last year increased by 36 percent, the loans to Hispanics by 25 percent, and the loans to Asians and American Indians by 7 percent, this hardly qualifies as progress for civil-rights activists. Robert L. Gnaizda, general counsel of the San Francisco-based Greenlining Coalition, told The New York Times that some lending institutions "will not go far [in lending to members of racial minorities] until they bear the brunt of more Justice Department suits."

And the administration has proposed new regulations under the Community Reinvestment Act that require banks to offer credit in the communities where they take deposits. The regulations would force banks to record the race and gender of small-business owners who receive loans. Regulators would use this information to make sure that financial institutions are lending money in the proper proportions (that is, by quotas) to targeted groups.

Under the proposed regulations, a business that is a male-female partnership would be considered as male-owned unless the female owns at least 51 percent of the partnership; similarly, a business with equal white-black or white-Latino ownership would be considered white-owned unless the "minority" owner possesses a majority of the business.

It's payback time for civil-rights groups who claim they were stiffed during the Reagan and Bush years. The Clinton administration has filled its anti-discrimination offices with representatives of left-leaning organizations who see race-conscious policies, along with tougher regulations on businesses and individuals, as appropriate ways to...