Look, owning a home is a good thing. I think everyone should buy a home.
In the same way that I think everyone should pay off credit card bills every month.
In the same way that I think everyone should contribute to their retirement.
That is, I think that you should do all these things IF YOU CAN.
These things come after hard work and significant sacrifice.
Often times it means that you have to take on immense debt and go to college. Then, taking a job and paying off your loans.
In other cases it may mean working a job, a hard job. And then maybe another one. And if you’re serious, a third.
It means hulu.com rather than HBO on demand.
It means hot dogs and not caviar.
A Cavalier. Not a Cadillac.
We all KNOW this. We live it, we teach it and love it.
Yet, when it comes to politics, it’s not what we get.. What we get are people in power trying to figure out how to STAY in power. And the best way to do that is to promise things to people who wouldn’t otherwise have those things.
But human nature is a strange thing. It happens to remain fairly consistent.
And when people who are poor with money are given things that are related to money; they do poorly.
And in recent years, WE have been giving those people money:
When you see a foreclosure sign, chances are good that you, as a taxpayer, are on the hook for the costs involved because Congress has its very own money pit — federal guarantees of mortgages gone bad. And the official estimates for the damage put it at more than $300 billion.
Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute warns that “the taxpayers ought to get ready to suffer some very substantial losses because of Fannie and Freddie“
That would be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now in conservatorship, meaning they are under the complete control of the federal government.
That’s right. Over the years, Fannie and Freddie have simply handed out loans to people who can not afford those loans. And when that happens, bad things happen.
The good news? Well, the good news is that we are learning from out mistakes:
“Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac own or guarantee a little over half the mortgages in this country,” said Ed DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency under which the two lenders fall.
And we are trying to reduce that number, right?
And their role is getting bigger, not smaller. “They are buying about 90 percent of all the loans that are made in the United States, all the home loans that are made in the united states today,” Wallison said.
Nice.
Something has to change folks. Something has to change.