While I disagree with FLU at times, this time I totally agree. I believe the fiscally responsible citizen is now a minority. Perhaps even a small one.
While I do believe that there was (is) greed and fraud at the top levels of the banking, finance and real estate related industries as well as incompetence at all levels of the political structure (nothing new there), what bothers me more is the level of fraud at the borrower’s level.
Nearly every property I look up on the MLS has been refinanced multiple times over the last five years and large amounts of equity have been extracted and, of course, spent. This did not occur on a minority of homes but rather on a large majority of homes. As all of us here know, this allowed those borrowers to live a lifestyle they would otherwise not be able to enjoy while the fiscally responsible people watched on the sidelines wondering when the shoe would drop. Well, it has dropped but unfortunately it has dropped on those who have been responsible and conservative over the last decade. Their neighbors will walk away from their mortgage debt but most likely keep all their toys and other remnants of the opulent lifestyle and move down the street to rent another home. Our politicians have made sure that some of them will not have to pay income tax on their debt relief so their lifestyle over the last few years and accumulated material goods will be essentially free.
Perhaps it’s not rational but for some reason that bothers me a lot more than some CEO walking away with $16 million after running a company into the ground. Maybe it’s because I can see it happening all around me whereas the world of CEO’s et al is far removed from my reality.
I somewhat expect some CEO’s to be greedy, incompetent and dismissive of the little guy but to have my neighbors flaunting their Escalades, giant plasma TV’s, Hawaiian vacations etc. in my face day after day grates upon me after a while. It almost cause me to refinance my own property and by some “stuff” but in the end I was rational and decided not to. Perhaps that was the wrong decision for it appears as though I am going to pay for it all anyway and, in the end, will have gotten nothing from it.
