What is Digg?160 Comments
- kemp34, on 05/17/2008, -7/+104I am a renter and a taxpayer and any bail outs for idiot borrowers or lenders on my dime is freaking infuriating. I don't care if Dick Armey and Steve Forbes set up the site, they are right! Transfer of wealth based on idiocy is NOT OK. Anyone with any wit at all saw this housing bubble. I called it in March 2005. So to hell with fools and ridiculous politicians bailing out those who made careless mistakes. Socializing losses is one of the greatest paths to societal failure.
- schif, on 05/17/2008, -3/+50All we hear these days is whining from reckless home borrowers and their banks.
But did you know that renters are 32 percent of American households? And that homes in foreclosure are less than 2 percent?
So why is Congress rushing to bailout high-flying borrowers and their lenders with our tax dollars?
Unfortunately, renters aren't as good at politics as the small minority of homeowners (and their bankers) who are in trouble. We don't have lobbyists in Washington, DC. We don't get a tax deduction for our rent and we don't get sweetheart government loans.
Quite simply, we are just Angry Renters. And now it is our time to be heard: no government bailouts! - GodzGurl59, on 05/17/2008, -17/+46I just have one thought; will the renters stop voting to raise MY property taxs so thier kids can go to school? And I sure hope none of these renters are on welfare.
- flip2trip, on 05/17/2008, -6/+28Even if they do vote to raise property taxes, they will still have to pay higher rental rates as I know owners pass those increased expenses on to the renter.
- bunki8, on 05/17/2008, -4/+24I don't think you people read the article. It's so harsh because the website is pretending to be grassroots and is backed / written by some very wealthy people (Forbes one of them). THAT was the point of the article. It actually posts the general arguments of both sides, but assails the website for trying to be something it isn't.
You chose this article to assail Murdoch (who I don't like either) but if this article was partisan at all it was to the side of liberal. - tkeeley, on 05/17/2008, -2/+19Not only that, but they're just setting a precedent that we simply cant afford. I read somewhere that 35% of those who are bailed out are likely to still go into foreclosure. It's ridiculous.
- kaelyiesta, on 05/17/2008, -4/+20Ah, wealth redistribution; Immoral in theory and impractical in application.
- worldchanger, on 05/17/2008, -2/+16that's because you can't separate the spiraling US economy from the trillion-dollar war that [a] made it start spiraling in the first place, and [b] continues to increase the speed at which the economy is crashing.
read up on economics sometime; it'll do you some good. - rockchops, on 05/17/2008, -4/+17buried for blogspam. link us direct to the actual article next time.
- Y0tsuya, on 05/17/2008, -0/+13Don't forget responsible homeowners who sat tight through the bubble without cash-out refinancing or HELOCing. We also have no desire to bail out the idiots.
- inactive, on 05/17/2008, -11/+24Thanks dugg!
- HappyScrappy, on 05/17/2008, -1/+13I'm not a renter, although I am a homeowner/mortgagee who took the wise selection (30 year fixed mortgage on a house I could afford) and now is looking at a situation where those who made dumber decisions than I are given federal handouts.
Stop rewarding people the people who make the dumbest decisions by bailing them out. It just encourages others to make dumb decisions.
It doesn't look like a hit piece to me though. It seems to correctly name the backers of angryrenter.com, and what's wrong with that? - chocobomog, on 05/17/2008, -2/+14You realize that the WSJ is "attacking" AngryRenter because it is promoting a conservative opinion and owned by Republicans, right?
And Rupert Murdoch earned his fortune through the Fox channel which played "conservative" programming like Melrose Place, Who wants to Marry a Millionaire, Temptation Island, Married with Children, BH 90210, American Dad, etc.
Just because Murdoch owns something doesn't make it conservative. - chikara8, on 05/17/2008, -1/+11I am a renter in a small, independent city within LA, with an outstanding educational program. I don't know how it is in the rest of the country, but here, most people with children are homeowners. I have no children, yet I pay a 10% increase in rent every year is due to the fact that other people's children enjoy a great education. My income does not increase by 10% per year, but the homeowners' property value does. So who is paying?
Understand that I do value education, and hope that my 10% increase does help the educational value of the kids in my city and not just making my landlord richer. I just don't understand why you blame renters for higher property taxes when most of us don't have children. - quomen, on 05/17/2008, -4/+13The Wall Street Journal is the best national newspaper out there. What are you trying to imply about them? Are you bashing them for being liberally biased? Good one. Second, this is an editorial, not a news article. Sorry if they are entitled to their OPINION.
- dunderballer, on 05/17/2008, -2/+11Those costs end up getting passed along to tenants as well. In the long term, it all comes out in the wash on the rental supply/demand curve.
- AWBoy666, on 05/17/2008, -1/+9I'm really confused.......WSJ is conservative, AngryRenters is conservative, I'm conservative.....but WSJ is attacking AngryRenters for being conservative??
And now Digg is supporting a conservative ideal?! WTF>?!! - groverblue, on 05/17/2008, -8/+16 The Government-Created Subprime Mortgage Meltdown
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The thousands of mortgage defaults and foreclosures in the "subprime" housing market (i.e., mortgage holders with poor credit ratings) is the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers. The policy in question is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which compels banks to make loans to low-income borrowers and in what the supporters of the Act call "communities of color" that they might not otherwise make based on purely economic criteria.
The original lobbyists for the CRA were the hardcore leftists who supported the Carter administration and were often rewarded for their support with government grants and programs like the CRA that they benefited from. These included various "neighborhood organizations," as they like to call themselves, such as "ACORN" (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). These organizations claim that over $1 trillion in CRA loans have been made, although no one seems to know the magnitude with much certainty. A U.S. Senate Banking Committee staffer told me about ten years ago that at least $100 billion in such loans had been made in the first twenty years of the Act.
So-called "community groups" like ACORN benefit themselves from the CRA through a process that sounds like legalized extortion. The CRA is enforced by four federal government bureaucracies: the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The law is set up so that any bank merger, branch expansion, or new branch creation can be postponed or prohibited by any of these four bureaucracies if a CRA "protest" is issued by a "community group." This can cost banks great sums of money, and the "community groups" understand this perfectly well. It is their leverage. They use this leverage to get the banks to give them millions of dollars as well as promising to make a certain amount of bad loans in their communities.
A man named Bruce Marks became quite notorious during the last decade for pressuring banks to earmark literally billions of dollars to his organization, the "Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America." He once boasted to the New York Times that he had "won" loan commitments totaling $3.8 billion from Bank of America, First Union Corporation, and the Fleet Financial Group. And that is just one "community group" operating in one city – Boston.
Banks have been placed in a Catch 22 situation by the CRA: If they comply, they know they will have to suffer from more loan defaults. If they don’t comply, they face financial penalties and, worse yet, their business plans for mergers, branch expansions, etc. can be blocked by CRA protesters, which can cost a large corporation like Bank of America billions of dollars. Like most businesses, they have largely buckled under and have surrendered to their bureaucratic masters.
Consequently, banks in every community in America have been forced to hold a portfolio of bad loans, euphemistically referred to as "subprime" loans. In order to compensate themselves for the added risk of extending these loans, many lenders have increased the lending fees associated with mortgage loans. This is simply an indirect way of doing what banks always do – and what they must do to remain solvent: charging effectively higher rates of interest on riskier loans.
But this is discriminatory!, complained the "community organizations." Thus, if one browses the ACORN web site, one can read of their boasts of having "predatory lending laws" passed in numerous states which outlaw such fees, prohibiting banks from protecting themselves from the added risk involved in making forced loans to "subprime" borrowers.
These are price control laws, and price controls always cause shortages. Normally, banks would respond to such laws by extending fewer riskier loans. But in this case the banks are forced to continue making the marginal loans by their bureaucratic masters at the Fed and the other three federal bureaucracies mentioned above. So-called predatory lending laws therefore force the banks to "eat" the losses. This is undoubtedly a contributing factor to the bankruptcy of dozens of mortgage lenders over the past year.
Then of course there is the issue of the Fed’s monetary policy having created the housing bubble, characterized by a spectacular escalation of real estate values in every American city over the past decade or so. This created a further problem for the financial institutions that are victimized by the CRA. They are forced to make a certain amount of bad loans, but because of the Fed-created explosion in housing prices, many thousands of subprime borrowers no longer qualified, by a long stretch, for conventional mortgages based on their incomes.
The only way these borrowers could qualify for their mortgage loans (even ignoring their bad credit ratings) was to take out adjustable rate mortgages, some of which had astonishingly low first-year rates in the 3 percent range, and sometimes lower. This is what has largely fueled the subprime mortgage meltdown – the inability of thousands of subprime borrowers to afford their mortgages now that their rates have adjusted upward. Thus, the combination of the Fed’s enforcement of the CRA (with the help of political pressure groups like ACORN) and its post 9/11 monetary policy in general are the reasons for the bursting real estate bubble and the "subprime" mortgage meltdown.
Don’t expect to read about this in the "mainstream media," however, which generally views groups like ACORN as heroic champions of the poor, laws like the CRA as anti-discrimination laws, and places all of the blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown on greedy capitalists, especially mortgage brokers. Encouraged by such reporting, the odious Senator Charles Schumer of New York has promised federal legislation that will reign in these miscreants, while the Bush administration is proposing an indirect bank bailout by having the Federal Housing Administration cover many of the bad "subprime" loans. This will create what economists call a "moral hazard" by encouraging even more bad loans to be extended in the future. Every banker in America will be glad to extend loans (at high rates of interest) to the most uncreditworthy borrowers if he thinks there is no possibility of default with the FHA effectively guaranteeing the loan.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo125. ... - eliot2000, on 05/17/2008, -4/+11Actually, the WSJ article reveals AngryRenter to be a sham site put up by Republican party operatives, so it's kind of unexpected they would go after them.
- eliot2000, on 05/17/2008, -3/+9The site is a sham Republican AstroTurf campaign.
As a renter, I do look forward to getting into a home. About a year ago, I applied for a $110,000 house (which is moderate here) with payments that I could well afford, with money to spare and was declined.
If I had gotten that house, I would be paying far more than I could afford, and it would not have been foolishness on my part. The house is still on the market, and valued far below what I would be paying on because the housing market was driven way up by speculators and banks giving loans for far more than homes were worth.
Mortgage companies got rich being reckless. Home buyers are being broken because they believed the economy would remain stable, not because they were buying outside their price range. Do we really want this country to become a place where buying a home for your family is an act of wasteful extravagance?
When you vote this November, think of someone you love trying to make a house payment they can't afford, and remember that the Republican party tried to convince you they were reckless whiners who got what was coming to them. - Frnnkdlxx, on 05/17/2008, -4/+10"You Puny mortals opinions are of no concern to our monolithic information mediums! We will continue to spew our propogandistic bile to our 2 or 3 octogenerian readers in Iowa and with the awesome power of their opinion we shall continue our rule over popular sensible public opinion!"
- King Murdoch - Taquoshi, on 05/17/2008, -1/+7While the school budgets are the major portion of the tax base at least in our litte corner of the world, please remember that it is the State and Federal government that keeps issuing "unfunded" mandates for the schools to meet. And guess where the money for those mandated services comes from??? You got it, your property taxes.
And just for the record those people who send their children to private school get to pay twice. Those who homeschool paid in a different way, too. So I'm not really sure that it is the renters who keep driving up your property taxes to pay for the public education. - Qong, on 05/17/2008, -2/+8I agree with quomen above. The Wall Street Journal is one of the few national newspaper's worth reading.
You're also clearly missing out on the points made in the article. It's attacking this Angry Renter site, which I hadn't even heard of before this, for being run by Dick Armey and Steve Forbes; and in fact not a legitimate grass-roots campaign to stop the housing bailout. - Y0tsuya, on 05/17/2008, -1/+7Actually plenty of people have called it but were dismissed as being crazy. Also, most of them just know the prices are not realistic but don't really know how to make money off that assumption, short of selling and renting. Most short ETFs are less than a year old, myself having just discovered them a few months ago.
- michaelpinto, on 05/17/2008, -1/+6angryrenters is an inside-the-beltway website trying to pretend otherwise:
"Founded in 1984, FreedomWorks is headquartered in Washington, DC, and has hundreds of thousands of grassroots volunteers nationwide. The organization is chaired by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey." - RX9735, on 05/17/2008, -0/+5You are right plenty of people have called it. I wasn't about to buy a over priced house I couldn't afford and now look, I should have so I could have gotten bailed out. It doesn't add up. If you can't afford a house don;t ***** buy one.
- DaDrake, on 05/17/2008, -0/+5I really wouldn't call WSJ liberal or conservative... it goes both ways and I subscribe to their newspaper.
- Y0tsuya, on 05/17/2008, -1/+6What's wrong with renting?
- chkdg8, on 05/17/2008, -6/+11***** IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!
- Chompy, on 05/17/2008, -7/+12Well *****, with the money we'd save just not being in Iraq we could bailout everyone in America and still have a few trill left over.
- pastab, on 05/17/2008, -0/+4renters DO pay right along with you, knucklehead. The rent goes to who? THE OWNER. Guess what the owner pays? Taxes.
Don't worry. NONE are on welfare. Cuz if they were, whoa. THEN what would we do? - Crimsoneer, on 05/17/2008, -0/+4God, somebody else who read the article. I'm shocked.
People, please stop digging this article just because it backs our preconception of WSJ as right wing propaganda. The article actually has a point. - FairDinkumMate, on 05/17/2008, -0/+4I agree with your opinion on the bailout. There is an argument that people were misled when they signed their home loan contracts & these are the people that should be bailed out. But if someone was misled(ie. lied to) to convince them to sign a contract isn't that what the justice system is for?
That said however, I have a thoroughly different opinion of the WSJ article. First of all, I am an Australian & believe me, when Murdoch does infect the editorial board, there will not be ONE WORD that could even be twisted to be anti-Republican, so I don't believe he is exerting his influence there - YET. Secondly, if Freedomworks was so upfront about who they are, why even in their rant today did they not mention ONCE the words GOP or Republican? Do you not believe there is a difference between a bunch of renters getting together to oppose a Democratic policy & a bunch of Republicans organising for a group of renters to get together to oppose a Democratic policy? To begin with it may open them up to having to answer questions regarding their opposition to bailing out home owners at the same time as they support bailing out big business(the ones who are losing money now but actually made a huge amount from this over the past few years!) - lickmylovepump, on 05/17/2008, -1/+5No, he isn't.
- Olfster, on 05/17/2008, -0/+4Move to Florida. I hear they think their homes are worth 500k but no one seems to believe them, including me. I think the worst part of any bail out of homeowners, other than I can not partake, is that it keeps prices artificially high thus making it hard on people such as yourself.
- quomen, on 05/17/2008, -2/+5The fed isn't doing it out of charity. Since Bearn Sterns was acquired by JPMorgan Chase, the fed will actually be making money off of the loan.
- jeffiek, on 05/17/2008, -0/+3"...can't contribute to the economy"
They'll contribute just about exactly as much to the economy after the foreclosure as they did before. They lose their assets (if they had any) not their income.
All the foreclosures haven't resulted in hordes of people wandering the streets. They just become renters in an apartment they can afford. Which is where they should have been in the first place. - TheWriteGuy, on 05/17/2008, -3/+6***** Rupert Murdoch. Kick him out of America.
- cwgannon, on 05/17/2008, -2/+5I don't think the 48,000+ people who have signed the petition really give two ***** about who started it and what their motives are. And if they were to give two *****, it wouldn't change the feelings they've clearly expressed regarding the situation.
- inactive, on 05/17/2008, -7/+10Amen! Dugg, fwd'd, & signed.
- cohortq, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4You should see what JP Morgan secured the "borrowed" cash from the Fed with, you know those bad loans that was taking Bear Stearns under. That's all.
- lickmylovepump, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4Quit talking to yourself.
- Wiggles2, on 05/17/2008, -0/+3Crimsoneer, you're comment makes a point, albeit a completely idiotic one!
couple of problems with your argument:
1) calling a bubble != calling the 'top', 2) you assume orig. poster had equity at the time (playing the downside requires equity), 3) probably more problems with your stupid argument but i waste no more time on you
many people called this a bubble or 'musical chairs' back in 2005, including me. no one knew for sure when it would bust, but it was obvious it would. the folks who got caught 'with their pants down' were the ones taking the gamble trying to be the last profiteers
'The Whole World Got Caught With Their Pants Down' -- only a ***** dolt who gets his info from the evening news would think this... the news always makes bad events seems totally unanticipated by anyone - loggia, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4Dang, read the article, folks.
The website is a phony, run by Steve Forbes and rich friends of Steve Forbes, inciting people to ask for something that will, yes, benefit Steve Forbes! And his rich friends! - inactive, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4I always have to laugh when an expose is labeled as a "hit piece." If the TRUTH is a hit piece, then you are doing something wrong.
- Izult, on 05/17/2008, -0/+3Seriously? That's the only angle you can look at this issue from? Schools? It's not about if renters do or do not pay taxes for schools (which they do in increased rents). It's about people being responsible with their finances and living with in their means. If you touch a hot stove you get burned. If you borrow more money than you can pay back you end up with financial problems. See? action - consequence. As a parent that concept shouldn't be too foreign to you.
- Schrodinger2, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4***** the WSJ's pointless ad hominem fest. This article got me to sign the petition. I suggest you all do the same.
- dmourati, on 05/17/2008, -1/+4There's a flip side to all of this.
"For starters, a sharp spike in foreclosures will increase the number of houses up for sale; additional inventory in an already glutted market will further depress prices. Second, houses in foreclosure generally fall into disrepair. Clumps of empty, boarded-up dwellings surrounded by weeds lower prices not only in the immediate area but also in nearby neighborhoods. And for every 1 percent increase in the foreclosure rate, a neighborhood's violent-crime rate rises 2.3 percent, according to a study by Dan Immergluck of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Geoff Smith of the Woodstock Institute."
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/22/real_estate/homeow ... -
Show 51 - 100 of 160 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is