I'm reading a lot of responses to the current crisis that blames all these people who are in economic trouble for the problem. From a commenter on Tasini's excellent diary on the reclist:
Sorry, but anybody who thinks that the real estate crash is in any way due to "predatory lending" simply doesn't know what they're talking about.
Real estate crashed because it was a bubble. Bubbles are followed by crashes. Always.
When people with 50,000 dollar incomes are buying 500,000 houses, they're being irresponsible idiots. No matter what the mortgage broker and the used-house salesman told them. 15 seconds with a calculator will prove that such a purchase can never, ever work. Hell, you can do it on a paper towel with a crayon.
Multiply that by millions, and you end up right where we are.
None of these people can be saved. They're all going back to being renters. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with renting. House prices will keep falling until they re-align with the average incomes in each area.
None of this can be stopped, and we shouldn't try.
Which is absolute and utter [expletive deleted] nonsense.
It's "blame the victim" bullshit. There just barely enough truth to it
to make it plausible, but ignores the forest for the trees: it implied that anyone who has less than perfect information, and acts with anything other than cold, rational self-interest, is an "idiot".
Human beings are primates; like most primates, we are social beings for whom belonging and acceptance are extremely important. We literally die without those things.
Given the extremely well-documented fact that incomes for all but the wealthy have been stagnant for almost 40 years, and the fact that housing and other features of modern life have continued to get more expensive, together with the strong social pressure (and constant propaganda from the rich and powerful through television and every other media) to buy a house and raise a family, it is no wonder that so many people are in hock up to their eyeballs.
The real story here, Tasini says, is that no one has gotten a fucking raise for 35 years. If wages had kept up with productivity (rather than adding helipads to already-rich people's yachts) then we would not be in this mess because PEOPLE WOULD BE ABLE TO AFFORD THEIR HOUSES.
I would add: The top marginal tax rate during the administration of that notorious Leninist, Ike, was 91.5 percent. That is not a typo. It resulted in it not being worthwhile to make 300 times as much as your lower paid workers, because taxes would eat up the portion of your income that could be described as obscene. The fifties were not exactly a time of breadlines and hardship. There was a broad and solid middle class.
Class warfare? Absolutely [expletive deleted] right it's class warfare. The rich have been warring against every class lower than them, cutting wages, saddling lower classes with ever-larger student loan debts, busting unions and so on, BECAUSE IT IS IN THEIR INTEREST TO DO SO; they wanted to keep more of their profits.
It's time we fought back. It's time we told those greedy fuckers that we want our fucking share back. Dammit, progressives, get WITH this. Harry Truman would be ashamed at the way we've bent over and taken it in the ass for decades.
Am I the only economic leftist here?