In a week dominated by more grim news from Iraq and another Republican sex scandal, Americans have not spent enough time talking about the horrific impact of one of George W. Bush's most cynical political PR stunts: his so-called 'ownership society' concept which, supposedly, encouraged Americans to 'buy' and 'own' their own houses.
Talk to people in any Midwestern state of late (e.g., Michigan) and you will hear that Bush's snake-oil lie of a policy has not only backfired in a huge way, but has wreaked unfathomable havoc on the American family. People who thought they 'owned' their homes are suddenly waking up to the reality that they do not own anything short of the worst loan in history--loans with payments that double again and again in a short period of time, forcing families with children to default and foreclose. And of late, rather than taking on the immoral lenders who oversold first time buyers on far more debt than they could possibly handle, Bush is still talking about the ownership society, only now he's pushing programs that suggest the problem is 'market stress' rather than straight up, Presidentially promoted criminal lending practices.
Here's the rest of the rant ...
Do I have anything ot say about it? You bet I do ...
There are those who make the case that the government owes nothing to people who've made poor financial choices. However, that fails to consider (as most of those kinds of arguments do) that the whole nation was led to believe that the upward spiral in home prices was never ending. The Bush administration pointed to it often as evidence that the economy was strong and encouraged people to go out and spend, spend, spend.
So people spent all the cash liberated by mortgaging the equity in their homes in the mistaken belief (a belief they'd been suckered into by administration statements and policy) that if they took out the full equity value of their homes today, the ever increasing market would make their homes more valuable tomorrow.
It ain't so. You cannot create personal wealth by increasing personal debt. You can create the short term illusion of it ...
The so-called "Ownership Society", advanced by conservative think tanks, touts "private ownership" as the highest value. I don't think there's a great deal to dispute there but when it talks about people owning their own homes, it neglects to mention that those homes are mortgaged ... in fact, the banks own the homes and let people live in them, giving them the illusion of home ownership.
As with most conservative strategies designed to "help the average American", it all works smoothly if you ignore a couple facts .
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