Monday, February 16, 2009

A Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

I see where you are considering a housing plan that would allow homeowners to stay in their over priced, ill financed homes, by allowing them to rent the home from the bank and hopefully buy the home back from the bank at some point in the future. I can certainly see and respect the motivations of your plan.

However, I am troubled by any plan which keeps homes off the market and delays or worse yet, forestalls any amelioration in home prices. As I am sure you have been told by your economic advisors, the disparity between personal incomes and home prices are at or near all time highs. So is the disparity between costs of renting and home ownership. Home price appreciation is vastly ahead of historical trends. I believe that it is essential to a healthy economy for these costs and prices to adhere to historical trends and be in relative equilibrium with respect to affordability. Past housing booms have been ended by a return to pre-boom pricing levels, adjusted for inflation. If these homes are not returned to the market there will be no end to the bubble and I, along with millions of others who did not make the mistake of taking a bad loan on an over priced home will forever be denied the American dream.

All of that said, I believe that your intentions are altruistic and I would understand if you felt it was essential to forsake the American dream of millions of savers who did not buy an over priced home with flim flam style loan, in order to save millions of people who made a bad investment on a home during the latter part of the bubble cycle. The only things I would ask for are these … First, an acknowledgement that renters like myself are being told to take one for the team. Second, since I watched you on TV, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, I would like an explanation as to why someone else’s pursuit of happiness is worth more to you than mine and that of other renters in this country.

Sincerely,

A Taxpayer

5 comments:

djhives said...

You just don't get it do you - this is SUPPOSED to happen. Nobody will go homeless - this has been planned YEARS ago. When this new legislation is passed "homeowners" (read people in DEBT) will be RENTING their homes from the GOVERNMENT - private property will END. "Equity" will END. Renting as a private landlord will END.

The sheeple have DEMANDED a welfare state by borrowing, so they shall be GIVEN a welfare state. The stimulus bill is just a nationwide SECTION-8 bill to finally put the disgusting surplus population where them belong: WELFARE.

Stop begging obama for help. He is simply doing what NEEDS to be done, which is bring in a NEW WORLD ORDER or global welfare state.

You can't control the masses of sheeple - and it's not logical for politcians to lead care about the minority (you). They have to be concerned with directing the masses of wanton, greedy, animal savages who are addicted to CREDIT (ie a free lunch).

Do yourself a favor and quit BEGGING Prime Minister Obama - take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY or you shall end up just like the useless eaters you are condemning.

Visit:

djhives.blogspot.com

to learn more grasshopper.

Unknown said...

H-EAVY, hives...

But be honest -- if you really felt that way, there'd be no life after breakfast, your limbs would atrophy and you would die of carpal tunnel syndrome as you attempted to type this from your cramped cell next to Room 101!

Really, there's no grand conspiracy at work, unless you count mass apathy. I contend that no branch of our government is such a precise machine as to contrive such a master plan as you suggest! Besides, there's ultimately no such thing as private property in this country anyway -- not where the gvmnt is concerned. Here's the much more mundane reality of it, or at any rate, my lay take on it; people (or sheeple, if you must) saw a stasis in their wages and salaries over the last few decades, but not in their appetite -- an appetite bred and whetted by cunning ad agencies and easy credit lines, respectively. As time marched on, recessions came and went and new global trade agreements wrenched a few numbers off our GDP, the American people came to rely increasingly on these easy credit lines more and more as a stop gap. Perceived wealth was the order of the day; liquidity was a quaint notion at best.

As an aside, there may be less mindless consumerism if the durable and consumer goods found on the shelves weren't such third rate chaff designed for obsolescence or with built-in perceived obsolescence -- a much more insidious thing, that. Then again, the really good stuff often costs really good money, and there we find ourselves back at the source of this conundrum. Instead of seeing an increase in wages/salaries/benefits, we saw interest rates go down on things like home loans. Need more money to realize your American dream? If a six percent raise won't cut it, buy a house with a home equity loan from your primary residence and sell it off for treble the profit in only a few short months after putting down some Tuscan tile in the kitchen.

So now the chips are falling and everyone's kinda scratching his backside and wondering -- wha happened...?

The best hope now is that the same inventiveness that gets us into these quagmires will see us back out again. We shall see...

Crowneagle said...

I suggested this idea to the white House via email a couple of weeks ago. The idea of rent to own has quite a few positives that will help us get out of this mess we are in. 1) The properties will be occupied which means they will be heated and maintained. The lawns will be mowed and the neighbors will have a family living next to them instead of a firetrap. 2) The investors that own the mortgages will have some form of a return depending on how it's structured. Right now they are getting no return on properties that are depreciating. 3) The property taxes will be paid thereby alleviating tax shortfalls on a local level. 4) The rents can be set by competitive bid on properties that are now vacant. This would bring private money into the equation which would increase the velocity of money and speed up our economic recovery. The private money deposited into the system would decrease the amount in the long run that the federal government would have to spend. 5) If there are properties that no one wants to live in, then they can be razed thus freeing up land for future development and removing eyesores from neighborhoods. Etc etc! I could think of many more reasons but space is limited here.

MacGregor said...

Amen.

Anonymous said...

yea its true. WHY ASK for them to do something different from what the masses have BEGGED for by their actions. its simple really.

and BTW. DJHIVES. THIS is MR.JELLY. Im sure u remember from youtube and your site.
HOWEVER,
I need you DJHIVES to add me to your blogspot. please