Bush Takes Hard Line on Mortgage Crisis

As he should. Let the sub-prime companies tank as they did shady business anyway while screwing over legitimate business people. I feel for those whose mortgage rates shot through the ionosphere, but they really shouldn't have been given mortgages in the first place. Here's the meat of it:

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is hardening its opposition to the chorus of Democrats, bankers, economists and consumer advocates calling for a big-money government rescue program for struggling homeowners.

In an interview yesterday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson branded many of the aid proposals circulating in Washington as "bailouts" for reckless lenders, investors and speculators, rather than measures that would provide meaningful relief to deserving, but cash-strapped, mortgage borrowers.

Mr. Paulson's comments came amid signs that the nation's housing market is getting worse, not better.

The housing market, like the temperature of the planet and the stock market is cyclical. Those who keep a cool head during the down times and don't panic will be ahead of the game when things improve. You have people who lose their cool like Al Gore and people who have experience and remain calm like Paulson. Three years from now, it will be a sellers market once again and houses will be worth 30% more than today and five years later they'll drop a few percentage points, that's how a free market works. The last boom was an anomaly driven by easy loan access, housing shot up to numbers that were unnaturally inflated.

Congress should have been clamping down on the sub-prime lenders prior to the meltdown instead of reactively going after them once the house of cards they created toppled. Instead, they took the industries donations and said nothing.

The proposed solution is not a solution at all but a hand out to those who should not have been approved for a loan in the first place. Just like the illegal alien amnesty issue, you don't award people for bad behavior and congressional Democrats, smelling votes, are trying to do just that.