Two additional points: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > > The head of the congressional budget office said he can't > > figure it out nor can he explain it to anyone. > > I don't know whether the head of the CBO is an expert > in financial markets; it's not necessarily the case that > a congressional budgeting expert knows much about the > kind of investments involved in the current crisis. Also, > it would be important to know exactly what he said, which > Moore doesn't tell us. Moore's could well be a > misleadingly loose paraphrase designed to make his own > points.
There are a lot of folks who *are* financial-market experts who are insisting that the bill must be passed, including some who were against it to begin with, such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Krugman is a politically very liberal economist and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration; he wouldn't be in favor of the bill if he hadn't come to think it was absolutely, crucially necessary. <snip> > > Do you know why so many Americans are losing their homes? To > > hear the Republicans describe it, it's because too many working > > class idiots were given mortgages that they really couldn't > > afford. Here's the truth: The number one cause of people > > declaring bankruptcy is because of medical bills. > > This is a very fancy and deliberately misleading > switcheroo. Bankruptcies *per se* are a non sequitur. > Having one's home go into foreclosure and having to > declare bankruptcy are two different things that are > not inevitably connected. I failed to make my main point here: Medical bills may be the number-one reason people declare bankruptcy; but they are *not* the number-one reason people can't make their mortgage payments. They can't make their mortgage payments because they aren't making enough money to sustain a mortgage in the first place; or because their payments went way up when interest rates skyrocketed; or because they refinanced thinking the value of their homes would keep going up, and they could sell them at a profit if they couldn't repay their debt. Instead, home prices fell when the housing bubble burst, and now their mortgages are worth more than their equity. Yes, probably some were too strapped by medical bills to make their mortgage payments; but that's a much smaller percentage of people. If Moore doesn't know this, he's abysmally ignorant. If he does, he's being disgracefully dishonest.
