Following up on Rick Santelli’s concern that any effort to aide aid families facing foreclosure will wind up “rewarding bad behavior,” here are some recent pics from the Associated Press.
This is Mary Ann Herrera, photographed in front of her San Antonio home Monday by AP photographer Eric Gay. She asked her brother to paint this plea for help on the side of her house, which she’s about to lose to foreclosure.
<sarcasm> As you can see, she’s been living the high life in her swanky McMansion. If you peek through the windows in that picture, you can just make out the granite countertops in the state-of-the-art kitchen. And now she wants the government to compel taxpayers to subsidize her life of luxury. The nerve.
This Oakland, Calif., house, photographed by the AP’s Paul Sakuma, is so huge that it doesn’t even fit in the frame of the picture. Clearly, these homeowners were looking for a shortcut and irresponsibly agreed to a mortgage they couldn’t afford for what anyone can see is Too Much House.
Just look at the expansive and expensive Xanadu next door and you can see all you need to know about this jet-setting neighborhood. I can just imagine the former homeowners kicking back on their leather sofas, lighting their imported cigars using $100 bills and laughing at all the hard-working taxpayers who are being asked to subsidize their extravagance. </sarcasm>
I don’t really understand why Santelli thinks that allowing judges to restructure these homeowners’ mortgages would actually cost me or the government any money. Replacing a write-off with a smaller, but sustainably profitable mortgage would actually save the banks — and thus taxpayers too — a ton of money. And reducing the number of foreclosures in any given neighborhood helps keep everybody’s home values there from plummeting.
So quite seriously I can’t fathom the prefab outrage that Santelli and his ilk have decided to pretend to feel over the possibility that some families who might otherwise lose their homes might be helped to keep them after all.
Santelli just seems like the kind of guy who would watch Smile Pinki and walk away complaining that the kid was just a freeloader taking advantage of the redistributionist fools who run Smile Train. I don’t care for that kind of guy.
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