Bill Roper's Journal

I don't hate it particularly, though the unnecessary jabs at culpable Democrats and no mention of culpable Republicans flags it as something to be wary of. Much as the phrase "disreputable activist group" in the blog entry you link to (re Senator Dodd) puts me on my guard against taking anything they say at face value. (Though I can see how a non-profit organisation trying to reduce the impact of predatory lending practices on low income families might be seen as disreputable by some.) It's good that we have these verbal tics and buzzphrases to make sure that nobody could imagine we were nonpartisan.

I saw the push for home ownership in the eighties and nineties (we had it over here as well) as an attempt to get more people into debt (and yes, we fell for it, if only because we needed to get out of London, and we've been struggling ever since). People in debt are easier to control, as Lord Vetinari would tell you, and a mortgage is a whacking great debt on which you end up paying at least twice the principal (we've seen cases of five or six times). Our (Conservative) government at the time knew that people who had a mortgage hanging over them would be running scared of any increase in their tax bill and pathetically grateful for any reduction in same, so they could go right ahead and sell off essential public services and utilities to profiteering private companies and use the money to cut taxes. We're still paying for that in a hundred different ways.

Real estate only goes up, but I've never been exactly sure why it goes up: my trousers are not worth three or four times what they were worth ten years ago, my car isn't even worth a tenth of what it would have cost new, so why should my house (which has gone through the same process of gradual dilapidation over the years) be automatically worth more than it was when it was first built? That's never made sense to me. As it is, we paid five figures for a house that was certainly built for no more than four, and the market is currently trying to tell us it's worth six. If I were a moron, I could probably (before this all blew up) have gone out and got a mortgage on the six-figure sum, and some huge company would have sat back and rubbed its hands and waited for me to work myself into the grave paying back seven figures. It's ludicrous, or at least it seems so to me.

Something has to be done, obviously. We can't just stand on the sidelines waving and yelling "burn, you parasites! Burn! Ahahahahahahahaaa!" Your plan seems on the face of it to make sense within the system, and I can't see any reason to object to it. Which could mean no more than that I haven't found the kicker yet, of course. :) And the National Debt does need reducing. How did it get so high? Oh, right.