Does this plan use money from the $700 billion bailout?

First, it will artificially keep home prices higher than a natural market would, this means that the homes that are refinanced will continue to lose value eventually. Also, let us not forget that a huge portion of these mortgages are refinances on existing home that got cash into the hands of the home owner that was then used to buy luxuries. I am not going to have my tax dollars being spent to give luxuries to people who did not earn them. Basically if a person who had a house worth 250,000 in 1999 refinanced in 2006 at the houses new value of 450,000 with a 120% mortgage, they just got 250,000 cash in hand to buy luxuries with, and now that the house is worth only 280,000, the government is going to take hard earned money from me, a renter, and give it to them. What did they do with that cold hard cash? Does not matter, the fact of the matter is that they had it, cold hard cash to do what they wanted, so please explain to me how this should make me feel, and how should I understand my government who takes my taxes to give to these people? There is not one single person who bought a house or refinanced in the market between 2003 and 2007 that is innocent, each and everyone of them made decissions that they felt benifited them.

here is my Fax to Senator McCain:

My fax to Senator McCain
Dear fellow disabled veteran John McCain:
(personal information was here)
I am 100% against you buying these bad mortgages, but since you seem hell bent on doing so, is there anything you can do along with this plan to help people like me?

I am a disabled veteran, I get a 30% rating, and because of my disability I am not always able to keep a job permanently so I do contracting. It is not that I get fired or anything, but after a while my disability starts to strain relations with other employees so I move on to a new job with new people. I have been wanting to a buy a home for a long time now, I even saved money up until around late 2005 which is when it became painfully obvious I was never going to catch up to the price of homes with my savings and my income. So, I finally gave up on the dream and got married with no home. I am an easy going kind of person, I do not need much to make my life worthwhile and my wife is the same. So it is heartbreaking to see that you are thinking of taking the responsibility of others and putting those responsibilities on me and my wife’s backs, as we are net tax payers.

Many people are going to be getting $50,000 or more of their mortgage forgiven under your plan. I personally see these people as one of three sorts:
1) People who desperately wanted a home and were willing to pay any price to have one and these are the least irresponsible, but they helped force home prices up so they are not without fault. They made their bed, and they should sleep in it, but you see it differently.
2) People who need to be keeping up with the Jones’ types who bought the absolute most expensive home they could afford or if they owned a home borrowed every last penny of equity they had in their home in order to buy new furniture, an SUV, a vacation or something else. While these people did not drive home prices up, they certainly knew what they were getting into when they made their decisions and they profited from this. Once again, these people made their bed, and they should sleep in it, but you see it differently.
3) People who bought on the way up hoping to make a buck on the back of some other person when prices rose at exorbitant inflationary levels, and are just unfortunately stuck with a home with decreasing value, and these are the worst of the worst in this crisis. These are predators in our society, and I do not give much bad feelings towards them, it is a capitalist society after all, but they should be allowed to fail and lose, but again, you see it differently

These are the people that you are planning to bail out. People, who were willing to buy a home at any price, or people who used their home as a status symbol or as a way to gain luxury items, or people who were predatory buyers. Your plan is to forgive them all of their bad choices. Your plan is designed to keep people in homes that they should either pay for according to their original loan principle, thus keeping the home off the market or be foreclosed on, thus making that home available to people like me. Your plan is to short circuit the market forces and this will inevitably damage the market, but it feels good to help people, just as long as you do not notice the people you are hurting in the process, people like me.

With this in mind, let’s look at people like me:
1) Responsible person who just wants a home, but was not willing to buy a home in a market that was deformed. (I had opportunity to do so, I chose not to)
2) Responsible person who is not out to get some status symbol or luxury in life I have not really earned. (I had opportunity to do so, I chose not to)
3) Responsible person who did not try to get a loan I knew I could never repay with the hope of selling my home to the next sucker to come along desperate to buy a home at any price. (I had opportunity to do so, I chose not to)
4) Responsible person who wants to buy a home, but that home needs to be both affordable as well as priced based on sound economic principles in a market place that is not artificially increasing the value of the home.
5) Responsible person who believes your plan is designed to keep house prices artificially high, thus making any purchase at this time risky in the fact that at some point in time the artificially high house value will have to drop to its natural market value, ruining any equity I built by paying my bills.

I can understand if you think that I am not one of the people who are deserving of a government hand out and am instead worthy of the government confiscating my hard earned money. When I see that my government is going to be giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who made bad decisions while taking money from people who made the right and responsible decisions in order to pay for that bailout, I certainly feel like I have been made a victim of my government, a government that is showing every evidence of becoming as corrupt as say the another government that decided one day to steal a man’s business from him, even though he had a government contract to run that business for 23 more years, and give it to a political ally. Even after the man won a federal government lawsuit the corruption to this very day still keeps that business in the hands of the criminal and out of the hand of the man who built that business from the ground up. Again, I can understand that you think these people are more deserving than I am, because there are other governments around the world who also do things this way. Most of them are run by dictators, but many of them are also factually functioning democracies that are in effect simple mob rule. So I can understand.

Maybe I should not feel shamed and just ask the government to give me what I want in life, like a nice home. Perhaps a modest one that even needs some repairs, because the prior owners were not responsible, they may have been very much like the people you plan to bailout. They bought a home they could not afford, and hoped that prices would go up, but when the prices did not go up they realized they were going to lose the home so stopped caring for it until they were evicted. I would be willing to fix the home, if I can get it. I am thinking however that my dream will have to wait, in order to allow people who made bad choices to keep their ill gotten dream.

I am still unable to buy a home; the prices are still much higher than they were before the housing bubble grew. The property taxes are exorbitant and still listed at their highest value, thus making the home harder to afford. So between a higher principle to start, about 35% higher than it would have been if home prices grew based on sound economic policies as they had for the 70 years before 1999, the extra interest payments on that higher principle, the higher down payment requirement because the home price is still inflated, and the property taxes that are double what they should be, I do not have the means to buy a home near where I work. The reason my means is so small is because I send much of my income to my wife’s family who live in the Philippines. Her grandfather who she was raised with is over 70 now and because of corruption over there he lost his business and at his age he is not likely to ever return to employment. This makes it hard for me to save much money each month, but we try. My grandfather in law is a victim of a corrupted government, a government that you must seem to want to emulate, because once the bailouts start flowing in this country the entitlement mentality is hard to shake, and when people are entitled to things they spend time trying to corrupt the system to their advantage instead of working, producing and earning. In fact most of our family savings was recently spent on a trip my wife took back to the Philippines just last month, I was not able to afford to take time off of work and go with her. The reason she had to go back to the Philippines is because the school refused to allow her to get her transcript unless she was there in person, as the school is trying to prevent corruption that is running rampant through that country. So I no longer have enough money for the fees associated with buying a home, let alone the down payment, although I do have access to 100% financing through the VA, VA loans have higher interest rates than conventional loans. I will try to again save enough money to eventually buy a home, but it is not always easy. Sometimes a family member gets sick and needs more money. A friend gets in trouble and needs some money to get by for a while. A disaster happens and people who are true victims need a little charity (Katrina, Ike, Floods in the Midwest, Iowa in particular as I have family there). While I feel bad for people who owe more on their house than the house is worth, these people made contracts and said they could pay the loan off, and they should either be made to fulfill that contract or be evicted so someone else can come in that is truly responsible enough to own that home.

I am a homeless disabled veteran (I rent), and I would really ask that you rethink your position on this give away to irresponsible home buyers. But if you want to bail these people out, then I think you owe it to us veterans that you can at least come up with a meager $25,000 or $50,000 in hard cash to help each and every one of us to buy a home. I am sure there are many other groups of people out there, and maybe just wealthy people who are also willing to ask for their hand out from the government

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: ‘From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.’”

-Alexander Tyler