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In reply to the discussion: So here's my thought, Pres Obama: The poor and the middle class have already taken their cuts. [View all]truedelphi
(32,324 posts)Last edited Tue Dec 4, 2012, 05:45 PM - Edit history (1)
i grewup inside a middle inocme family, with my dad being the main bread winner, and he tauight both of us kids that:
One) If you buy a house, you will be required to put at least 20 to 30% down.
Two) You shouldn't buy a house if the house payments are more than 25% of your income.
Three) You should never buy a house if you can't abide by One, and Two above. (Special circumstances exempt, of course - you've won the lottery and it will be two months before the state sends you the Super Lotto check)
But I actually walked away from a real estate deal in early 2000 - simply because the way the realtors discussed the "liars' loan" part of it, made it seem like the world of real estate was rather fishy.
But the people who have been losing their shirts are not necessarily people who went out and bought homes in 2000 to 20-05. They are people who expanded their delicatessens, their dry cleaners, their accounting service, their car lot, their beauty parlor etc.
BTW, if you examine the way that the Paulson/Geithenr/Bernanke hand out of "settlements" and bailouts for the Big Financial firms has actually worked - those who set up the leveraging and then went and made bets against the very products they had been helping to sell (i.e. mortgages,) those people were rewarded by our system of Bailouts. If you believe in what the auditors of the Federal Reserve reported - the reward was a nice big fat one, too. Some fifteen to sixteen trillions of dollars.
Meanwhile in Iceland the people who had corrupted the system are now sitting in jails. Iceland is now in recovery mode, with its people free of worries about their economy.
And in Ireland, when the government Bailed Out the Too Big To Fail crowd, the Too Big To Fail types were told that the Bailouts offered security for any outstanding mortgages that existed. So the people that actually get the bill for the Bailouts, i.e.,the citizens, had received benefits also. In the USA, not at all. Same old scam of telling us average blokes that we just better pay the way of the privileged.