A tax on prudence
You might have heard about Obama’s $10 billion plan to bail out people with bad mortgages. I’m not even going to go into the details of it to explain why it’s a colossally bad idea.
Quite simply, it is a tax on those of us who were prudent and bought houses within our means. I’ll grant that the present situation of multiple defaults is not good for banks and other prospective buyers. The panic it has created has made it much more difficult for anyone to get a loan to buy a house. It’s translated into a general pull-back in lending overall.
A lesson needs to be learned by a great many people. And a government bailout is NOT going to teach that lesson. It will instead reinforce the bad behavior, guaranteeing more of it in the future.
I maintain that this all started with government pressure to increase home ownership of certain politically-preferred identity groups, regardless of qualification. The only proper way out of this situation is for people to lose their homes, banks to lose money to defaults, mortgage brokers to lose money to lawsuits from the banks to which they sold mortgages they knew were bad, and congresscritters to lose their seats when the depth of their perfidy is revealed.
I hold out no hope of any of this happening. Instead, I will be told, at virtual gunpoint, that I am expected to pick up some part of the slack for some idiot that makes less money than I do to help him pay a mortgage on a house four times larger than the one I bought.
I am to be punished for daring to live within my means.
You figure out the lesson that teaches.