Mortgage Rescue: diagnosing delinquency
On Obama's housing plan was on CNN last night (AC 360 2/20/2008; transcript accessed via Lexis/Nexis):
"TOM FOREMAN: Many who oppose the bill, however, seem to understand it fine. They just think it's wrong.
(on camera) Opponents argue this plan simply has no clear way to determine if a troubled homeowner added to his mortgage problems by spending too much money on other things, for example, sending his kids to private school or buying expensive cars or taking lavish vacations."
Obsidian Wings comments,
Back in the Reagan era, I used to marvel at people who would first rail about the excessive size of government bureaucracies and then complain about, say, welfare fraud. (I was all for managing bureaucracies more effectively; it was the people who seemed to resent their very existence who puzzled me.) If you want a program to be able to distinguish the people who actually qualify for welfare from those who don't, I thought, someone needs to be going through their casefiles. And if you fire all those government bureaucrats, is it any wonder that the people who remain don't do as good a job making those distinctions?
[ Via obsidianwings ]