This really chaps my ......

Great, so now I get to pay for everybody that took out a mortgage for houses that they can't afford. What the hell were my wife and I thinking when we bought a modest home that we knew we could actually afford, even when we were approved for considerably more?? So now, I get to foot the freaking bill for living within my means. Man am I pissed.

 

Pred, don't you realize that if your nation were anything other than the entity known as the United States of America, they would long since have defaulted on their debt and declared bakruptcy?

They bought the houses that they knew were beyond their means, so they should have to deal with losing the house. It'd be better for everyone if they got evicted--- they'd moved to a place that they could afford, and tax money that could be used elsewhere would be freed up.

"But that will hurt their credit". Too damn bad, they were the irresponsible ones. Why should the fiscally responsible citizens bail out the ones that are not?


Now, I'm all for helping the people who got thrust into the situation, who are struggling to really try to do their job. THEY are the ones that deserve the help. If you got laid off and are struggling to make payments, then ok, you get help.





Edited by Linus - 18 February 2009 at 12:33pm

brihard wrote: Pred, don't you realize that if your nation were anything other than the entity known as the United States of America, they would long since have defaulted on their debt and declared bakruptcy? U.S. government isued debt is now a house of cards. The bottom card has been taken away already, it just hasn't started to tople yet. Your nation is bankrupt. A ten trillion dollar debt is an absolutely ludicrous amount of money. America has no business continuing to incur a deficit. The rest of the world tolerates it and pretends the emperor isn't naked only because the remainder of the world's financial industries are dependent on the masses blindly continuing to accept the fiction of the American-centric world financial order. The financial practices of your nation's lending industry are equal in stupidity only to the fiscal policies of her successive governments for quite some time now. At this point I'd rather the entire system collapse and rebuild; we could have the world economy back on track within ten years. Unfortunately the world doesn't have the cojones to let the necessary happen.

Bri, is the Canadian military a "don't ask don't tell" situation? Because I just might be gay for you after your last few political and financial posts.

Seriously though. He's right. The US has been living a lie since about the mid point of George H.W. Bush's presidency. Our market isn't actually down. It's where it should be historically. Our who financial system has been inflated for 2 decades to the point where the smallest hiccup was bound to cause problems, let alone anything major like the mortgage crisis. That bad debt needs to go away the traditional way, by dropping the value of the market to the point where you'd be insane not to buy. The problem is that rather than making the individuals who made the mistakes live with the consequences, and making the banks that knew better than to give them loans, but did anyway, deal with it on their own, we're bailing them out. All this does is bring the values of those of us who are smart with our money down to the lowest common denominator.

"Back in the USSA........"

But Adam Smith!

I am witholding judgement until I get more facts, but here are two thoughts:

While I am still mulling over most of what Bruce said, I have to comment on the part about "dwindling property values."  I view them more as normalizing to where they should have been all along before government interference in the market and easy loan terms artificially inflated the values by disrupting the balance between supply and demand.  Any government action aimed at maintaining those artificially high values (or that results in that) will only prolong the problems and perhaps cause them to reoccur.

LEGALIZE

FreeEnterprise wrote: So bruce.   Did the governments focus on pushing banks into making easy loans to give "everyone" the right of home ownership, cause this mess?   You know the community reinvestment act. sponsored by groups like acorn.