I was in agreement with Rick Santelli of CNBC when he lamented that those who pay their mortgages are being saddled with subsidizing those that don’t. A lot of people were in agreement with Santelli- so many in fact that it brought a response from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke: [Thanks L!]
You could punish him by refusing to send the fire dept and then he would learn his lesson, but unfortunately in the process you’d have the entire neighborhood burning down.
CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera quoted a reader who gave the following response:
My neighbor was smoking in bed, his house did burn down, and half of my house was destroyed with it. The Fire Department hit the snooze button on the fire alarm several times, showed up late (house was fully engulfed and ready to collapse) and, had a squirt gun to fight the fire.
Cabrera’s response:
Now they are going to waste precious and expensive water (taxpayer money) by pouring it all over the embers.
To this I would add a slightly different view:
A relative has overextended themselves- a lot. They are in debt way over their head. You don’t have the resources to bail them out, and you would not do them any good in the long run if you did. Consequently, you let them take their financial lumps- you just make sure that they have enough to keep the kids fed and off of the streets.
My neighbor’s house is NOT on fire Mr. Bernanke- it’s just overvalued. Consequently, my neighbor has no money to go out and do all the spending that the government so desperately wants him to do. I’ve been renting for the past four years, waiting for house prices to come down so I can buy one without ended up like my neighbor. When his house goes into foreclosure, he moves into housing he can afford, and I can buy the house I’ve been waiting for. It sounds like a good plan to me, and you want to mess it up for both of us.
Sir, your testimony was biblical in it’s tone, with a Judge not, that ye be not judged, theme. (Matt 7:1) However I would prefer you read on a little further to Matt 19:19, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. That means ALL of your neighbors, and ALL of us need affordable housing- even if it hits the balance sheet of the banks.
Bernanke can’t prop this bubble up, and isn’t helping any of us by trying. Here’s hoping he figures that out before bankrupting all of us.
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Twist, well said. It’s scary how distant reality has become for our leaders. I bet a poll would show a whopping majority favor your proposal and let nature take its course. Of course the response would be from our fearless leaders is we know what we’re doing. I wonder what that poll would show. Sure hope our new pres is more than a slick politician or we will need God to bless us.
Nature will still take it’s course, and we will go kicking and screaming the whole way, just like we always do.
There is no financial cure all for stupidity. There is only one cure. That is really the comparison which should be made.
My neighbor is not that bright, and must learn from his/her mistakes. To continue BB’s lame analogy. How intelligent is someone who smokes for starters, then falls asleep smoking in bed. If I have homeowners insurance, I’ll get a check or my house will be rebuilt. I also change the batteries in my smoke detectors, so they will go off and I will get out of the burning house. My not so bright neighbor will die of the fire they started, and I’ll move on to the next neighbor and possibly repeat the process.
Twist is right though, it is a bad analogy and it doesn’t apply here. The government refuses to make citizens responsible for their actions, which is not the purpose of government. Help the elderly and little children, but the rest must jog on. Our government is corrupt. There is no other possible explanation for their behavior. They are paid up by all the wrong people.
I’ll add my thoughts since I think they have relevance.
I’m about as hands-off government as they come. Still, I see the value in a social net. I’d be fine with jobless aid and homeless aid (even significantly expanding these to include extensive retraining and education or limited healthcare if needed). The biggest problem I see in policy making today (and it’s a doozy) is that our president, treasury and banks are all fighting the wrong fight.
Foreclosure and bankruptcy are not problems. They are the SOLUTION. The problem is overindebtedness and too much risk taking.
Why would we want to prevent people from SOLVING their problems? The only answer I can give is that we must either have some of the stupidest people in office or there is a vast conspiracy to keep people as debt slaves. I don’t see any other possible explanations from trying to prevent people from availing themselves of natural solutions that have worked for hundreds of years. We need to speed up the foreclosure process, not slow it down. Move the assets from weak hands to strong hands so we can get the country moving again and these overindebted people back out and spending their discretionary income instead of sending it to zombie banks that won’t survive now matter how much money you stuff them full of.
Coming Soon …To a federal building near you.
http://easyopinions.blogspot.com/2009/02/department-of-gdp.html
Igor says: loony
Hutch,
Is there an 800 number I can set up my first appointment or do they just come and take you in the middle of the night?
Hutch-
I thought that was hysterical, but I hope no one in the government reads it. They are likely to administer it by setting up a DOPE- “Department of Protecting Everything”. [Taxpayers are of course not considered a part of everything.]
How about DEBB – The Department of Enlarging Budgets and Bureaucracy.
Jim-
Isn’t that pretty much the mandate of all federal departments?
Indeed twist, indeed – and not just at the federal level. I’ve done a lot of work for smaller government entities and all appear to operate largely on this principle, though never on such a grand scale as we’ve seen lately.
It’s funny, have you ever noticed that government, by a pattern over the last decade or more, but seemingly more and more as time goes by, seems to constantly be crying crisis, crisis, if you don’t pay more and more and more taxes and allow the government to grow bigger and bigger and bigger, we can’t fund the police, or the fire department, or the schools, and won’t you think of the children? It’s all fear, all the time – the world will end if you don’t give us more power and money and control each and every day. In every boom, government spending increases massively, and when the bust comes, there you go, time for tax increases, and now, yet more government spending and new regulation!
I’m in my late 30s, and the way things are going, I’m sure that by the time I retire, the day to day living experience of the average U.S. citizen will have been reduced to one big line at the DMV.
Over 50% of the population seems to want that though, and the only thing I can fathom as to why is that people are lining up for the welfare state and willing to deal with endless bureaucracy and interference in their day to day lives in order to get a share of the gov’t cheese, and hopefully stick it to “the rich” in the process. Sad that it has come to this. {Sigh}
Jim-
Too many Americans don’t understand that in order for us to be free to prosper, we must also be free to fall flat on our face. Take away our freedom to fail, and our freedom to prosper is taken away as well.
Americans no longer seem to be willing to sacrifice for their freedom- we are giving it up in the name of “security”.
It makes me very insecure.
Yes Igor, I’m “sorry” too.
Problem is, my neighbor built his house purely out of sticks of dynamite with all their fuses lit (ie: they are set to go off as the same time the mortgage resets). In other words, my neighbor was an utter fool and it was only a matter of time before it exploded and took part of the neighbourhood with it.
The sooner my neighbor’s house is allowed to blow up, the sooner (A) he learns to stop building houses out of sticks of dynamite (B) others that he has impressed learn to that it is not such a great idea to build houses out of sticks of dynamite, (C) the government seriously starts considering making better rules to stop people from making houses out of sticks of dynamite, (D) me and my other neighbours can stop having to pay so much attention to this tragedy we know is coming, and get back to our normal lives, and (E) the government can stop wasting money hiring people to try to blow out the fuses (only to have them always relight right away).
It is great how Rick Santelli’s “rant going viral” was greeted by the powers that be. Several times over the past couple of years, I remember him participating in the CNBC morning chats after his report from the Chicago Board of Trade and thinking, “he is the only honest person on this network.”
So, he shook up Bernanke and especially Obama and his minions. How dare someone inspire people to take action via the internet against Barack (and Ben).