[quote=mlarsen23]I actually think this is progress. If they go with a rental program, it means that the government is giving up any hope of these people owning their house. This would be a good thing. I’d be much happier putting them on a kind of straightforward welfare than I am trying to arrange some program that could ultimately allow them to keep their house.

A rental program could be good if it was limited to lower incomes/housing prices.[/quote]

But the thing is, not everyone who is losing their home now is doing so because of poorly-negotiated and poorly-thought out toxic mortgages. Now the rot is creeping up the ladder to Alt-A and prime because owners are losing their homes – not because they were irresponsible and bought more than they could afford – but because of something they really can’t control: unemployment. I don’t think most of the people losing their homes now would be considered welfare types. Heck, any one of us on this board who has a mortgage would fall into the “welfare” category if we lost our job now and went on a fruitless search for new employment for 6+ months. There but for the grace of God go I.

I personally think this rental proposal that Obama is “mulling” (like he “mulls” anything? The people who pull Obama’s strings have plotted out their steps YEARS ahead!) has been the end game of the Power Elite for decades now. I think we can all agree that home ownership has been the surest path to the middle class for decades. Block that path, and instantly you have a country that doesn’t resemble the former United States so much as many parts of Europe and medieval England, where serfs toil for the privilege of living on a lord’s feudal estate.

I remember a few years ago, just before this crisis started to heat up, I was trying like mad to sell my house. My father couldn’t understand my desperation. He kept telling me, “Even if there is a crash, the banks aren’t going to just kick people out of these houses en masse. At the very least, they need someone in the house to protect it from vandalism. They’re lenders, not landlords.” But I never saw it that way. I saw what was coming as the biggest wealth transfer in the history of mankind. And I could clearly see that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to kick people out of their homes to accomplish this. Because their homes would be sold from under them for pennies to whoever still had money (dollars, yuan, Euros, whatever), and the former “owners” would gladly stay put to preserve the illusion of a dream that was long gone. Because if you really stop to think about it, unless you own your home FREE and clear, you are already a renter of sorts. And the bank IS your landlord. The only difference now is that everyone who falls for this arrangement will effectively be making interest only payments with no ownership.

This is all history. The world has gone medieval before. Now it’s happening again.