The more I read and hear and learn about this Economic Bailout plan and the factors that caused the need for it in the first place, the angrier and more anxious I get. Mostly angrier, although quite a bit more anxious too.
Let me preface this by saying that politically, I am all over the place, which I think may be true for a lot of people. Socially, I feel I am fairly liberal, and tend to side with the Democratic view of things. Economically, some would probably say I lean to the right. I am always growing and learning and re-analyzing my stance on everything. Sometimes, I hate my inability to just choose a side and take a firm stance on issues...I can see valid points on both sides and have a hard time choosing which is the better approach. I am working on that though :)
I am so angry and sickened by the level of
G R E E D on EVERY level which has gotten us into this situation. From the greedy bastard mortgage brokers who contrived all kinds of crazy loans so that they could get every Tom, Dick and Harry into a home and put another dollar in THEIR pocket regardless of whether or not these people could afford the mortgages in the long run when the crazy ARM they got them into started changing rates. Even if those people OBVIOUSLY did not fully understand what they were getting into (NOT that they are blameless, we will get to that later). I know these brokers were out there because we had it happen to us...Despite the MILLION times during our phone conversations (first red flag; I will NEVER do mortgage business with someone over the phone again!) I stated that we did not want ANYTHING besides a 30 year fixed mortgage, and although every piece of paperwork we received stated that's what we would be getting, we still ended up at the closing table looking at a contract for a 2/28 ARM loan, with 2 years of fixed rate and an adjustable rate thereafter! We ended up signing it, after a long, heated phone call to the broker's boss who "unfortunately couldn't help us" (our broker conveniently happened to be on vacation the week we closed?!?!!?!), because we really wanted the house, and were young and not experienced and were afraid we would loose it to the couple who
just missed getting their offer in before us. I tried to straighten things out with the broker afterward, but yeah right, no help coming there. I am a freak about finances, I don't like taking risk when it comes to my finances, and so I ended up refinancing our mortgage a year later because I was afraid the rates were going to go up. Turns out we could STILL be riding that out at an equal or slightly lower rate than what we have now, but that's okay, my piece of mind is worth that 1/4 point or 1/2 point, as well as knowing that my rate will never go up to the 12% that the ARM capped at, which we would NEVER have been able to afford.
I am angry at the greedy people who signed risky, huge mortgages for huge houses that they ultimately cannot afford. I mean, who needs 4,000 square feet of house?!?? Seriously, unless you have 10 kids, you REALLY do not need that much house. If you can afford it, GREAT, more power to you, then I guess you deserve it, but GREED led too many people to disregard common sense and put themselves out over the edge of the cliff financially so that ONE little set back and they were falling and loosing it all. Maybe they didn't really understand what they were signing, but I have no sympathy for that...when you are signing something of that magnitude, you dang well MAKE SURE you understand it before you sign it.
I DO acknowledge that there truly were SOME people who just did not have the capacity to understand what they were getting into, who were preyed upon by the mortgage lenders and told "Yeah, we can get you into a home, sure", and for those people, I just feel sorry.
I also realize that I am not immune; although we are not dangling precariously over the edge, we aren't in the back of the pack, either. Were the economy to get really bad, and if W were to loose his job and not be able to find work, we could find ourselves in dire straights. HOWEVER, we did not get ourselves in way over our head when it came to buying a house; we stuck to what we could afford REALISTICALLY, and we have a 130 year old average size home that is nothing awesome, not huge by any means, but it is ours, and our mortgage is manageable enough that we could weather through some storms and make sacrifices on other things so that it would have to be pretty bad before we would default on our mortgage.
I am angry at the meat heads on Wallstreet and the big banking institutions that see nothing but dollar signs and continue to deal in 'bad paper' (as I have heard it called) even after they KNOW the deals are riskier and riskier, because they are making BIG BUCKS and don't have enough ethics to stop.
I am angry at the government for not doing SOMETHING to regulate these business practices that have now put the ENTIRE COUNTRY'S, and possibly the world's livelihood on the line. I hear all this talk about how so many people at different levels of gvmnt knew that the house of cards was bound to fall if something wasn't done, and yet NOTHING WAS DONE, and now we are looking at putting $700
B I L L I O N of taxpayers money on the line to bail out the very people who profited from and CAUSED this problem because if we don't, if we let them go under and pay the consequences of their greedy, unethical behavior, it will hurt the rest of us worse in the long run...so they tell us. And I guess, then, that I think we HAVE to do it, but you better believe that they had better have some TIGHT ASS OVERSIGHT on the companies that get bailed out, and be DAMN SURE that the bastards who made millions and millions and millions of dollars and helped put us all in this situation do not get millions more after their companies are back on track before WE get our investment back.
I am anxious and scared about the future. We have worked hard to get where we are, and we are comfortable...we do pretty good. But like I said, we could find ourselves slipping toward the edge fast if the economy got as bad as some say it could. And then I think about others whom have it harder than us, and where will that leave THEM?
I started this post feeling very angry, but now I am down to just feeling anxious and scared and uncertain of what tomorrow brings...
