Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Are homeowners the next bailout?

Absolutly not. I urge everyone who reads this to, email their elected representatives and urge them to not bail out the individual borrowers who have over extended themselves. There is no bail out for stupidity. There are no favors for people who over extend themselves with credit cards, car loans or the loan sharks in the back allies of the world.

The only possible rationale for bailing out the dumb is to bail out those who could afford those same homes, to protect their investment. However, that reasoning is flawed. If it weren't millions of dot com programmers, receptionists and others would have something to show for the millions of dollars in stock options that took them from being paper millionaires to being lucky to have the down payment on a house, when the dot com bubble burst. Those gains weren't real and neither are the present real estate gains. The only real gains are in the pockets of the person who sold their home before this bubble burst.

The housing market MUST be allowed to find a natural equilibrium. Until that happens, the banks will not know the value of the investments and the volatile stock markets will not stop swinging wildly as bad news follows false good news day after day.

For Hillary Clinton to suggest that bailing out the individual home owners because a large investment bank was bailed out is highly populist and self serving. Her statements are not meant to do anything other than to bolster her own cause to be President of the United States of America. There is nothing altruistic about her suggesting the troubled home owners be saved. They aren't facing impending doom or life on the hard streets of America. These are decent people who made a mistake, took a short cut. However, at the end of the day, these people still have jobs, families and retirement accounts to fall back upon and build upon for the future. Bailing them out only serves a few, while bailing out the banks benefits the whole United States.

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