Foreclosure Bailout Issues

People have seem to have bailout amnesia. People are angry about the state of what is going on. People are angry seeing their 401Ks and IRAs worth less than 1/4 to 1/2 as it was last year. People are angry that their home prices seem to be in perpetual free-fall. People are angry that their pay is stagnant and their jobs may be in jeopardy. People are angry that the housing bubble party is over and the hangover is much worse than most anticipated. So to find people angry about the foreclosure program is not hard.

Angry over the entire situation may not be the same as anger at the program. Dislike of the program may not mean that you do not want it to work. Disliking the situation one is in is not synonymous with not liking the current plan, or any plan. There is a group of people who want to do nothing and let the system sort itself out without any intervention. If that is ones feelings and it is consistent that is one thing - like Ron Paul's position. But if people are voicing anger at the plan are they angry at the situation the United States finds ourselves in or are they angry at the particulars? Or are people just so angry at the current situation they can not distinguish between the causes. Many of the voices just focus on the anger, not the reasons why. This brings us to an article from MSNBC titled Bailout for homeowners stirs up strong feelings which lets people vent. Lets take a look -

"I feel like I'm doing the right thing paying my mortgage, and now apparently I have to pay my neighbor's mortgage, too. People are really angry," said Kim Sansom Guymon, a stay-at-home mom who bought a three-bedroom home with her husband in suburban Seattle in 2001 and has watched it drop $150,000 in value since last summer.

Rescuing distressed homeowners does not sit well with Robert Bechler, either. Still, the 37-year-old flooring contractor said he sees little choice.

"If they don't bail those people out, it's just going to get worse. It's a necessary evil, I suppose," said Bechler, who with his fiancee just bought a house in Cape Coral, Florida, for $92,000 after waiting years for prices to fall.

...
O.B. Brock of Charleston, West Virginia, opposes bailing out people who got in over their heads and the banks that helped them.

"It's just rewarding crooks," said 38-year-old single mother, who said she turned down a bank's $100,000 mortgage offer five years ago because she knew she couldn't afford it.

...
"I could sit back and say, 'Hey, I'm not getting anything and that's not fair.' But I've been fortunate enough that I don't need a bailout," [Debra Rodriguez, of Tucson]said.

...
"Does it reward bad behavior? Absolutely, it does. But no more than the banks who offered these loans rewarding themselves for their own bad behavior," said [Chris Grande of suburban Dayton, Ohio], 26.

No one wants to pay someone else's mortgage. Just as no one wants to see their home value continuously fall. People are angry at the entire housing and economic deterioration. Finding ourselves in the middle of one of the worse recessions in decades, perhaps the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is making everyone angry. But being angry at the situation is different from being angry with the plan - and from the article we can not tell what the strong feelings in the article are derived from.