First Things First

I would like to thank the U.S. Government for making my job as a cartoonist so easy.

When it was first announced that Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac were going into receivership,  I started working on the verbage for the takeover.  Treasury Sec. Paulson gave me the weekend to reminate, and I’m pretty happy with the result.  Of the comic at least, not the government intervention.

It galls me, but I have to agree the move was necessary.  Continued turmoil in the housing market is an albatross around the neck of the economy, and if there’s any hope of breaking the recession there needed to be a big check on the downward economic news spiral.  Unfortunately, it’s being written from our childrens’ future.

The housing mess was avoidable.  Proper oversight would have caught the NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans, and this morning we discovered  Freddie Mac had overstated its financial cushion.  And yet, over the next few days the directors of Fannie & Freddie will be given a nice quite severance package in the millions.  They don’t deserve it.  If any small business owner had gone bankrupt while obfuscating their debts, they would be ruined and face potential legal action.  Take the golden parachutes and instead use them to pay off the mortgages of people who bought houses in good faith, the ones who didn’t try to pick up a McMansion but instead tried to buy into the American dream.  The three bedroom, 1 & 1/2 bath folks.  Pay off their mortgages and let them put that money into buying that new car they need, or saving for their kids’s college, or even just to be able to quit that second job so they can spend some time in the home they’re fighting for with the family for whom they bought it.

And a thought to leave you on:  We just put the housing market  under the control of the people who didn’t act to protect it in the first place.

This entry was posted on 8. September 2008 at 09:31 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.