[clue-talk] The stimulus bill

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 13:54:00 -0500
Angelo Bertolli wrote:

> The way it's supposed to work is the lender is supposed to use things
> like credit score (which goes down the tubes if you pull something like
> this), income, etc. to decide if they would like to lend that amount of
> money or not.

Which is how it would have mostly continued to work, if not for the
intervention of the federal government (Carter Administration) to push
lenders into making disadvantaged loans in the name of "affordable
housing". That was actually a fairly small thing (on the scale of our
Leviathan government), until it was greatly expanded under Clinton. This
is one of the "fairness" credos of the left, that everyone should earn a
"living wage", and then a "living wage" should include the American Dream
of home ownership.

As you've pointed out, home ownership ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Speaking as a renter, I will say that ownership has definite advantages,
and each person has to weigh those. But let's not ignore the role of the
feds in artificially lowering the bar to ownership to the point where
people who truly could not afford a mortgage were getting them anyway.

jed