Where’s the Relief for those Facing Foreclosure?

With the feds prepared to throw a trillion dollars of our hard-earned money to prop up Wall Street and the investor class, is it too much to ask them to do something for the people who are the real victims of this mess?

I’m talking about the people who’ve already been forced into foreclosure or those who are just about to be.

I mean, if the government is going to back the mortgage securities, why doesn’t it just pick up the mortgages itself, and let people stay in their homes.

Let the government, at least on a temporary basis, become the savings and loan officer, with the power to renegotiate the mortgage downward and adjust the payments and interest rates downward, as well.

The government would have to shell out less money than it’s planning to at this moment, and it would be buying up real property, which will retain most of its value, unlike some of the bad paper the government is scooping up right now.

Assume there are three million people in, or facing, foreclosure. And assume that the media value of each home is $200,000. That’s $600 billion. Even if the houses were overvalued by 30 percent, the government would be on the hook for $420 billion—far less than it’s exposing itself to now.

Or, the government could let people stay in their homes and become renters, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has proposed.

Unfortunately, the Democrats aren’t advocating any of this.

But they are urging Congress to pass a law that would allow judges the power to renegotiate the mortgages of those who file for bankruptcy.

Check this out: Under current law, judges are not allowed to do that on your primary residence, only on those other houses you might own.

But who owns more than one house?

John McCain and his friends, I suppose, and that’s who the laws have been written for.

We need to change not only this class-biased law, but the entire upper-class orientation of the government. And now’s the perfect time to start.