Because I Can

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/foreclosure-rescue-mirage#comment-194653

Too Bad
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on August 26, 2009 - 5:34am.

It's difficult to feel sorry for the individual homeowners who don't get the government to magically erase their problems. My husband and I bought a $50,000 fixer-upper in Vermont in 2003, and put our own money into it to basically renovate everything. We knew that the payment was low enough that we could continue to afford it even if only one of us was working, which was what happened when I decided to stay home with our kids. And because the payment was low, we managed to continue to save money to float us by when my husband was recently laid-off for three months.

People signed onto loans that they should have known that they could not afford. It doesn't take a PhD in math to figure out what would happen if the rate changed or a person lost a few months of income. This isn't saying that the government is also to blame for its lax rules. But people should take some kind of personal responsibility.

But as I sit here in my modest home reading about people losing their "dream homes," I really don't feel sorry at all for them. Maybe I don't have my "dream home" yet, but I still have my home. They thought they deserved a great McMansion right off the bat and now they are paying the price. They should have known better. Now taxpayers like me who did know better are supposed to bail them out. No Thanks.
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Heartless and Smug
Submitted by I'm Just Sayin' (not verified) on August 26, 2009 - 6:47am.

O.K., "Too Bad" we get it. You don't care about millions of families dispossessed from their homes; desperately struggling folks and their children literally forced out onto the streets to fend for themselves. Neighborhoods filled with abandoned homes that these same families could have continued to occupy as renters, if someone in D.C. or even say, Vermont, cared a little more about regular folks than about bankers. That doesn't bother you. We get it.

But for the rest of us folks (even those of us who regularly make our mortgage payments) we DO give a damn, even about folks who make mistakes, or more often than not were misled by unscrupulous mortgage brokers. And maybe you should too since you're so concerned about your tax money being wasted. Chew on this-- if these default rates aren't significantly reduced in the near future, you can kiss the possibility of a meaningful economic recovery goodbye, in which case, get ready to have a lot more of your precious tax dollars wasted on attempting to keep insolvent zombie banks in business. If they can't make a market for those CDOs then they will not become solvent anytime soon and we will continue to bail them out over and over again. Maybe you need to rethink the situation as you sit there in the warmth of your modest Vermont home. Cause if we don't stop these defaults soon it will be "too bad" for all of us! I'm just sayin'.
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Jesus Christ in a birchbark canoe
Submitted by RW Twain (not verified) on August 27, 2009 - 12:20am.
tagged as: solution

"Maybe you need to rethink the situation as you sit there in the warmth of your modest Vermont home."

Perhaps you should stop and think about the situation altogether.

You assert that it is a justifiable power of government to save individuals, or to tax the whole for the benefit of the few, either wealthy or impoverished. You place full blame on mortgage brokers for sins they could not commit alone, while pushing for intervention on stop-gapping CDS defaults as the panacea for saving the economy. Given that tripe, you launched a salvo against the Vermont poster for smugness?

The VT poster was simply enunciating a view that success and overall happiness in life are dependent upon personal responsibility in a person's actions. That poster did not overpay for the house, and apparently made the commitment to labor sweat equity in to the "modest Vermont home" to provide for her own comfort. Repairs weren't likely financed on credit cards or a cash out HELOC, but spent from dollars that the poster would rather not have taxed for the benefit of those who failed to exercise the type of financial responsibility required in adulthood.

You seemingly argue for tax dollars to be used for the ongoing support of the disendomiciled and flipperquesters, but not for corporate welfare. I agree on the latter point, but am repulsed by the former. I'll pay taxes for the convenience of the roads, rails and post, willingly endure expenditure of my earned, but lost wealth for police, fire, schools and the like (perhaps even universal health care), but I will never condone the taking of my wealth for use in unjustified wars, bureaucratic inefficiency, fraudulent public spending or welfare for individuals who failed to comprehend the long-term consequences of their instant, exhibited avarice. Calculating that as a total, I unwillingly endure 75% of all current federal spending and perhaps 15% of state spending.

A recovery won't be obtained from rewarding those you have failed. Support for those who are justifiably downtrodden underlies the eventual recovery of the US economy, but it should not be drawn entirely on the backs of citizen taxpayers. We can't have a recovery of the economy until the majority of us, masters and slaves, Congresspeople and lobbyists, aging, hippie liberal douches and pissed off, redneck conservatives, rediscover the enlightenment that is personal responsibility and morally upright behavior.

Until that time, it's simply pissing in the wind.

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