Faith leaders from across the United States are taking their prayers on holiday to the Treasury building in D.C. Why they can’t stay home and pray on their knees in their bedrooms like good little boys and girls is beyond me.
Oh right, they want media attention as they beg and plead with an invisible entity that’s blind, deaf, and dumb and if it exists at all, doesn’t care about foreclosures otherwise he might have gotten involved a lot sooner than this, yeah?
Forty clergy and 135 congregants, many facing foreclosure, will gather in prayer at Pershing Park across from the Treasury Building before delivering a letter to Treasury Secretary Paulson on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 11:00 a.m. EST. 500 clergy from across the country will have signed the letter urging the Treasury and banks to take a systematic approach to loan modifications, keep families in their homes, and put a floor on falling housing values.
They’re going to pray AND deliver a letter to T.S. Paulson? So they don’t actually believe their prayers would be good enough to get the job done? We’ll pray but we’ll also do something ourselves that might help fix the problem. Then, if it succeeds we can forget we took the initiative and just thank the invisible man in the sky. And, if it doesn’t succeed, then we can put all the blame on Paulson, not the fact that prayer is a waste of time.
What a good arrangement.
I’m in Canada and I don’t own any property. I’ve been renting the same apartment for several years and the day I own a house will the be the day one’s willed to me, in all likelihood. And then I will probably have to sell it soon after because I wouldn’t be able to afford to keep it up. American Thinker has a good rundown of what caused the American mortgage meltdown, tracking it back from the beginnings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to their years of mismanagement until this past year when they finally required bailouts.
2007-2008
The housing bubble began to burst, bad mortgages began to default, and finally the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac portfolios were revealed to be what they were, in collapse. And the testimony is evident as to why. As Wallison noted, “Fannie and Freddie were, I would say, the poster children for corporate welfare.”
September 2008
Rep. Arthur Davis, whose testimony is found above in October 2004, now admits Democrats were in error: “Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.”
American Chronicle compares the current dilemma with what happened in the early ’80s and comes to what really should be anyone’s logical conclusion.
Looking at both the S & L Crisis of 1989 and today’s mortgage meltdown, we see that liberal lending practices plant the seeds of their own downfall. And, that strong demand for homes, with continued price escalation is not sustainable. In 1989, we waited for the foreclosures to stop before we began to see home prices stabilize. In some areas this has happened, and inventory is dropping. And, as we move forward, we could use a new financial innovation – one that limits borrowers to what they can truly afford.
That would be innovative all right. It’d also kill retail establishments, car dealerships and tourist industries. I think the world revolves around credit. Canada seems to and the U.S does too, but not quite as badly as some reports have indicated.
Although most Americans seem to be avoiding the credit card trap, there are still plenty of people on the financial edge:
* More than a third — 36% — of those who owe more than $10,000 on their cards have household incomes under $50,000, according to the VIP Forum analysis.
* 13% who owe that much have household incomes under $30,000.
All in all, I’m glad I’m not a big spender.
I’m pretty sure prayer won’t fix the fact that people can’t afford their houses. The article quotes part of the letter the clergy has signed but I don’t know enough to know if what they suggest is feasible or even practical. I feel somewhat sorry for people who’ve had mortgage issues. I’m sure there’s more to it than trying to live past one’s means and failing miserably but I don’t really get how housing prices are set and why interest rates fluctuate and all that. It’s nothing I’ve needed to look into for my own situation.
PICO provides more information about this trip to the Treasury and what they’re hoping to accomplish with it.
One Minion's Opinion 