Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand 14 for the very good reason that he could not afford it 14 why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn't afford it either but who got in over his head anyway?
Hell of an assumption. How does Mr. Sowell know for a fact that the person couldn't afford the mortgage? How does he know that the mortgage wasn't well within the means of that person's income...until he was downsized?
Well, first of all, if they weren't making crap loans, to afford a $700k mortgage, you'd basically have to put $175k down on a $875k property. On top of that, you'd have to have an annual household income of $291k a year. The odds of that being the case are fairly low. Realisitcly, wages that high tend to fluctuate a fair bit due to a bonus structure, commission, sales fluctuations, or regularly expiring contractual terms. I know a number of people/households whose incomes exceeded that on a regular basis, and NONE of them came anywhere near accepting mortage terms like that because over a 30 year span, their income is too variable.
Most of the responsible people in homes that expensive were carrying MUCH smaller mortgages.
REgardless of income, if you bought so much home you couldn't bear one person in the house being umemployed, you weren't exactly doing it right. When you got a mortgage for 5 times your annual income, you also weren't doing it right.
Because Democrats are in charge! We all must pay to support special interest groups so Democrats can get more votes and get more tax and spending power for themselves.
So in your world, Mortgage Banks are a special interest group of the Dems???
And who, oh who, could have been in charge for the last 8 excruciating years while this predatory lending was taking place? Could it have been (cue echo effect) S-A-T-A-N?
Well, there were a whole lot of democrats taking a lot of less than ethical kickbacks form places like countrywide.
Not to mention you had Clinton restructure severeal executive branch departments to lean heavily on Fannie and Freddie to write unwise loans to poor people.
Bush even tried to put on the breaks in 2003 and 2005. Then he went and started letting investment banks who had securitized the bad paper make the problemw orse.
SO yeah, pretty muhc the Dems were working the mortgage banks, the Republicans were working the investment banks.
steamed
So why not?