Reply #111: Plus, it wasn't their actual neighbors

[Alcibiades]

It was the imaginary neighbors summoned up by Rick Sanchez. Had their actual neighbors gotten an actual mortgage modification, the teabaggers would not know about it.

Plus, the narrative crafted by Sanchez and the other teabaggers has been that it has been poor people, or freeloaders, who caused this mess, ignoring the sorts of complicated derivatives that acted as a risk multiplier, or the level of leverage on Wall Street. Also, they cannot answer basic questions, such as "what is the average value of homes foreclosed upon in the housing crisis?" and "Are you sure these are really low-income borrowers?" The housing crisis was caused at least as much by the favorable tax treatment of capital gains on the sale of a home and the "flip this house" industry that revolved around it. In other words, speculators. Just anecdotally--and I'd love to see some real data on this--many of the folks who ran into trouble are folks in "hot" real estate markets who kept piling on mortgage debt to make improvements, getting their homes reappraised, piling on more debt, etc. These folks were not the poor, but upper middle class, supposedly financially savvy people.