Our Congress has let us down once again, and soon, so will our President.
Congress approved mortgage relief for 400,000 struggling homeowners Saturday as part of an election-year housing plan that also aims to calm jittery financial markets and bolster the sagging economy. President Bush said he would sign it promptly, despite reservations.
I don't think you realize how much this "housing bill" is going to cost the American taxpayer. I don't think you realize exactly what this bill will do. This bill will not help 400,000 struggling homeowners, I do know that.
This bill allows the FHA to spend $300 million to back new mortgages (where the homeowners showed they could actually afford a new loan anyway).
This bill allows Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to buy home loans as high as $625,000. It also allows them to buy mortgages at a rate 15% higher than the median home prices. This section alone will cost the taxpayers billions of dollars. Just watch.
This bill allocates $180 million in "pre-focreclosure counseling" for stuggling homeowners.
This bill includes $3.9 billion to "fix up" neighborhoods.
This bill gives $15 billion in tax cuts to first time home buyers, and a tax-credit of $7,500 for people who purchased their homes after April 9th of this year. Funny, I thought it was the people who bought their homes before this year that had issues. Huh, silly me.
Oh yeah, and the powers that be in Congress increased the limit of our national debt by $800 billion to $10.6 trillion dollars. TRILLION.
Do you know how much a trillion is? 1,000,000,000,000. That's a huge number.
If you go back 1 trillion seconds, you would be in the year 29701BC.
If you had a spaceship with enough fuel to travel 1 trillion miles, you could travel to the sun and back 10,752 times.
With the current population of the United States standing at just over 300 million people, if our national debt was $1 trillion, each citizen would owe more than $3,320.
Then again, we don't have a national debt of one trillion dollars, right now, it's almost $10 trillion and Congress just made it worse.
Break out the checkbooks people. You elected these morons, and now you're paying for it.
Chip Flowers
