This works out to about $400,000 per person over the age of 18 in this country. I don't owe $400,000 on my house. How about this for a mortgage bail out, pay off every mortgage in the country up to the $400,000 limit. That would free up some major cash for American families. After all that's who this is for right, American families. No mortgage payments means no default crisis.
Of course I don't favor the nation going even deeper in debt and its no ones responsibility to pay off their debt other than their own. Which makes me wonder, whose responsibility is it to make good investments? Who makes the profit when those investments are sound? Conversely who should take the hit when they go south? If you answered the investor keeps the profits when they make them and the tax payers foot the bill when they go in the crapper; congratulations you have what it takes to go to an ivy league school and run an investment bank, or congress.
We need a man like Calvin Coolidge again.
"I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form."Calvin Coolidge
UPDATE
Man did I screw up the math on this. The error was caused by my not paying attention to which data set I was using from the census bureau. I compounded my mistake by screwing up the formula I typed in excel. The break down should be:
US HOUSEHOLDS Age 25 to 65 by household status buying a home = 46,380,000
DUMB IDEA FOR A BAILOUT = $700,000,000
AVERAGE COST PER HOUSEHOLD = $15,092.71
30 YEAR GOV BOND (today's quote from Bloomberg) 4.50%
TOTAL COST OVER 30 YEARS $27,561.21 per household
I majorly screwed that up. I'm not changing the post, you can all see the mistake. My bad. It doesn't change the fact that this bailout is a really really bad idea. Kudos to Giraffe for catching my error.
