Bailout Schmailout

All this rhetoric about bailing out homeowners that bought houses they should never have bought in the first place makes me want to barf. Yeah, there were probably a lot of sleazy mortgage brokers, sleazy bank officers, greedy investors, etc, that help create this crisis, but fundamentally it's about homeowners that bought more house than they could safely or reasonably afford (likely based on the falsehood put forward by Realtors that real estate almost always goes up.) That's a little bit like saying inflation always occurs. In general that is a true statement, notice I said "in general".

Now the question becomes: "Why should the taxes the rest of us paid be used to cover the losses of these gamblers?" Yes, I called them gamblers as that's exactly what many of them were. Now that their bet is being called, those that bet house prices would always go up lost. Too bad! If they had put some equity into the house, or only bought a house that they could reasonably afford to pay the mortgage on, or not based their purchasing decisions on current short term teaser interest rates, they wouldn't need a bailout. They gambled that housing prices would continue to rise and they lost that bet. Yeah, the fallout is going to be painful, but again, why should our tax dollars be wasted on this?