High housing prices hurt people.
Further there are plenty of people out there that want to buy houses. And many of these people are the young people that supported Obama. And these people are locked out of the housing market because of ridiculous prices.
There is nothing progressive or liberal about keeping housing prices high.
And it hurts the hell out of poor people.
Your house is not an investment to send your kids to college nor is it a replacement for your retirement savings.
People that lose their home to foreclosure can rent. And the worst thing that can happen to anyone facing foreclosure because of a loss of a job is high housing prices because high housing prices and high rents go hand in hand.
Instead of throwing tens of billions of federal dollars at the real estate industry and their lobbyists, these billions would be much better spent on direct aid to the unemployed. This plan to levitate housing prices will not work and we all pay for this at the grocery store in the form of inflation and higher food prices.
Here is Denninger on this housing bailout:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/...
Policy-makers better listen up and do so soon. This, along with Rick Santelli (and by the way, CNBC ran a poll on the "TeaParty", and over eighty thousand people said they would show up!) is tapping into what America feels about all this nonsense.
Let's face the facts - 92% of Americans are either paying their mortgage or don't have one. We didn't use our homes as ATM machines. We didn't lie about our incomes. We played by the rules and do not have bone-crushing debt loads.
The rest of America is a different story.
Another fact: For every American that has a house they can't afford there is another American that wants to own a house, but can't because prices are still too high. For those of us who look at our homes as shelter, not a speculative investment, we don't care what the price is on our abode - we want a place to live, not something to use as a means of "levering up" as some grand ATM that we can tap to pay off our credit cards (which we then charge up once more!) My residence more than tripled in price from 2000 to 2007, and now it has lost most of that appreciation - being worth somewhat more than it was when I bought it. So what? My home is not a speculative investment - if it was, I would have sold it when the Realtors came knocking on my door in 2005.