Mortgage Bailouts
Are you an idiot to keep paying your mortgage?
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to feel like complete morons if they don’t participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn’t afford.”(via Instapundit)
The article explains how a new government program to help low equity homeowners who are behind in their payments, and exactly what it would take to qualify for the program if you are not behind one your payments (most notably, by stopping paying them.)
This obviously underline the problem with this sort of thing. If bad behavior is rewarded, one can reasonably expect more bad bahavior. There are of course people who are in trouble through no, or little, fault on their own, and it would be nice to be able to help them, but there are very real difficulties in doing that sort of thing, and I expect that this plan will be a whole lot more costly then expected.
