Michelle Malkin puts it very well here.
"He spent the entire debate assailing massive government spending — while his featured proposal of the night was to heap on more massive government spending to pursue home ownership/retention at all costs. If Obama had proposed this, the Right would be screaming bloody murder about this socialist grab to have the Treasury Department renegotiate individual home loans and become chief principal write-down agents for the nation."
Economist brad DeLong clarifies what this plan actually means.
"What does this mean? It means that John McCain wants to give $100 billion of taxpayers' money to America's worst-behaving mortgage financiers.
[...]
The McCain plan is:
- Take $300 billion.
- Pay double current market value to banks that have troubled mortgages on their books, thus:
- Give a present of $100 billion to the bankers who made the loans.
- Acquire and regularize the mortgages of only two-thirds as many homeowners as could have been accomplished if the $300 billion were invested wisely.
There's a big difference here: Democrats want to prevent depression and support the financial markets by investing taxpayer money in banks with troubled assets. Republicans want to give taxpayers money away to the shareholders and managers of banks with troubled assets."
When my wife and I purchased our first home in 2003 we locked in a mortgage rate that we could afford over the long term and did not gamble how long we were going to live there or how long the markets were going to stay stable and geared towards sellers. We moved just as the market began to take a downturn in early 2006. My step-father was in the real-estate business for a very long time and the first thing he told us was that an ARM was not a good idea and by its nature would be a gamble on a couple of levels. Lock in that low long term fixed rate while you can was his advice. he had been through the last market downturn as a manager of a real estate office in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Of course, he was right and we did the right thing.
McCain's plan is to reward bad behavior, lousy investments, and banks who were to greedy to temper the market with wise investment decisions. The banks gambled and lost. So now his plan is not to cut any spending, but increase it by giving a blank check to people who behaved badly?
McCain's judgment with economics had been bad since Keating and will continue to be so. He is hermetic, unpredictable, knee-jerk, and lacks reasonable judgment in times of crisis when even-tempered decision making is needed to settle things down. He is impetuous, impatient, and defaults to military action as the means to resolve international crises rather than default to eve-tempered and forceful diplomacy.
McCain wants us all not to trust Obama, but where is the evidence that trusting McCain with the keys to our nuclear arsenal is a reasonable idea when his impetuous judgment has been sorely lacking with even 0an economic situation?
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