No Bailout!

As short sighted and crooked as the Bush administration has proven itself to be, I find myself uncomfortably agreeing with them on their resistance to a giant mortgage bailout to help increase the profits of the banks that made billions by creating these loans in the first place. Americans have become very fat, and very soft. We cannot handle any discomfort or risk. We want to roll the dice like big gamblers, and then we want the government to give us all of our chips back if we lose. That is the path toward national bankruptcy. Every oily politician wants to spend our money to help people who do not deserve help. Politicians only care about themselves. We do not have to let them get away with it.

The entire premise of these bailout proposals is that the borrowers in trouble got conned. Well this is America. You have the right to get rich, and you have the right to get poor. You do not have the right to free handouts from the government. You cannot change the rules of the game because this time the outcome is uncomfortable. Too bad. If you want to take out Extreme Loans then maybe you’re going to get rich off of your real estate genius, and maybe you’re going to end up broke, but you made the choice, you signed the contract, and the consequences are yours alone. I haven’t heard anybody crying about how they were conned into making $300,000 on a house that they sold at the top. It’s only the losers who want handouts who cry.

If you can’t afford your payments, then you can’t afford your payments. That’s it. Nobody is going to save you. The bailout talk is giving false hope to millions of people, and is causing them to delay making a final decision. That delay is costing them money. If you earn $60,000 per year, you cannot afford a $250,000 mortgage let alone a larger one. If you are using credit cards to pay your mortgage, you are crazy. If your house is worth less than your mortgage, walk away. Stop waiting for a bailout, and give your house back to the bank.

And I have no idea why anybody cares about the banks. There is no possible scenario under which I would care if BofA vanished. What I would like to see is for the top executives of the banks to be thrown in jail. There was obvious theft. If the government is being asked to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into the banks, then it’s obvious that somebody stole, or caused to be destroyed, hundreds of billions of dollars. Robbing somebody of $200 at the ATM will send you to prison, but stealing the entire banking system is OK? No. Prison time. In this day when somebody gets arrested for a high profile crime, they are charged with 20 different crimes from one act (which seems like it ought to violate the constitution), so I’m sure somebody can come up with a list of crimes with which to charge these executives. They were not only gambling with investor money (which is perfectly fine), and breaking lending rules if not laws, but by requesting public bailouts, which they are already receiving in the form of lower interest rates and government subsidized loans, it is clear they gambled with public money. For costing the American tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars, lots of people should go to jail.