Foreclosure Pandemic

Re Op-Ed Columnist: Lost in a Flood of Debt by Bob Herbert (Nov. 24, 2007):

"I’ve been visiting some of the people who have been most affected by the subprime mortgage debacle. It’s a largely bewildered, frightened group that includes people like Dorothy Levey, a 79-year-old widow who sits alone inside the small house she has lived in for 41 years, afraid to answer the telephone or the door.

"She has every reason to be worried. The monthly note on her house in the city of Markham, just outside Chicago, is approximately 100 percent of her meager monthly income. Broke and behind in her payments, Ms. Levey expects a foreclosure notice to show up any day, followed by a visit from “the sheriff, or whoever they send to tell you to get out of your own home.”"

So begins Bob Herbert's column. While his prose is excellent, he misses one key ingredient in the current foreclosure pandemic: our form of capitalism demands that the average American pay tribute to the elect. We cannot have economic winners unless we all chip in. This sometimes means we must give up our homes or food or medicine, but this is what our Founding Fathers intended.

To the skeptics, I ask: how else can we pay hedge fund managers $1,500,000,000 per year? How else can we grant $50 million bonuses to Wall Street executives? The dough has to come from somewhere!

It is very easy for pundits to bellyache about little old ladies losing the homes they lived in for over 40 years, but not so easy for them to design a substitute system which produces billionaires.

Our role is clear. The elect must be given their due.