Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > August > 09
Thursday, August 9, 2007
ID cards, Usher as hero, 5-acre fuss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham plans to introduce legislation to replace paper Social Security cards with plastic biometric cards. It’s so employers can be sure immigrants are here legally. The country’s not ready, and may never be, for a national identification card. Otherwise the REAL ID driver’s license law, to take effect nationally Dec. 31, 2009, wouldn’t have drawn opposition from more than a dozen states. The biometric identification card was to be for immigrants, not citizens.
• Well, no, Atlanta City Councilman H. Lamar Willis, he of the H. Lamar Willis Foundation, hasn’t “taken responsibility” for the error of misinforming donors that their contributions would be tax-deductible. Taking responsibility would be giving them the option of getting their money back and, as a second option, paying their income tax liability.
• Too bad that churches and shopping centers don’t get together on parking. Neighbors of First Baptist Church of Atlanta in DeKalb County object to its plans to take out a heavily wooded five-acre site on North Peachtree Road for a 625-space parking lot. Small churches should be in neighborhoods, big ones in commercial areas with parking.
• Former DeKalb County schools Superintendent Johnny Brown, paid $410,000 in 2004 to go away, says now he “found DeKalb County to be just a wonderful experience.” I’d get plain teary-eyed at the memory of a place that gave me almost half a mil not to work there.
• The most vulnerable Republican in the Georgia Legislature should be given an assignment: introduce bills to outlaw possession of dogs for fighting and to make it illegal to be a spectator at a dogfighting match. It’s a no-brainer.
• Usher is my new entertainment-industry hero. He married his pregnant girlfriend, Tameka Foster, setting a fine example for all the world. Straight-up, did the right thing.
• Sorry, IKEA. Sorry, pandas. But Trendy H&M has taken your PR team. It’s opening in Atlantic Station after having “achieved a cultlike following worldwide,” and jubilation in these parts approaches giddiness. You’d think Atlantic Station had landed its own Bass Pro Shops.
• Insensitivity is a cardinal sin, to be sure. But I’m about to OD on entertainers, sports figures and other celebrities who claim to be driven to win by a loved one’s disease, accident, illness or suffering. It’s become a marketing ploy.
• It’s hot. A bridge falls somewhere in America. Two more reasons to blame George Bush.
• See, Mr. Speaker and Mr. Lieutenant Governor, what you both fail to understand is that Grady’s not about whether a hospital survives. It’s about racial spoils and power. White-bread Republicans who inject anything but other people’s money can’t win. The solution is local.
• Way to go, Mayor! Doraville’s Ray Jenkins reinstates police chief John King, who was fired by city council for being out of the loop or a “part-time” chief or something equally unspecific. He’d served an 18-month tour in Iraq. Said the mayor: “I’m willing to put myself on the line for him. He went to Iraq and fought for me and now I’m going to fight for him.”
• You knew it would be just a matter of time before one of the Democratic presidential candidates rushed to the aid of people who bought more house than they could afford and may, additionally, have lied about their income to get it. Now one has. Hillary calls for penalties against “predatory” lenders and a $1 billion federal fund to help buyers avoid foreclosure. If enough people behave irresponsibly, Big Government will ride to the rescue. And what’s a “predatory” lender? Some individuals — like the former closing attorney from Cumming, Christopher Halcomb, sentenced Thursday to 37 months in prison for submitting false information to obtain loans — are crooks. But “predatory” lending is a PR term.
• Is Hillary Clinton really allowed to refer to herself as “a girl”? My sensitivity meter’s gone haywire, my paradigm’s busted and my Political Correctness 101 test needs to be regraded. I may have passed the course.
Permalink | Comments (188) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
Mortgage door closed? Good.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The market has been brutal, as free markets usually are, to mortgage lenders that played fast and loose with easy money. Brokers and lenders were too quick to put unprepared and uncreditworthy buyers into financial arrangements that virtually guaranteed disaster for both lender and borrower when the unexpected happened. And it did. Rising foreclosures among subprime borrowers and the resultant reaction of Wall Street investors has consumed one lender after another, with American Home Mortgage Corp. of Melville, N.Y., being the latest to file for bankruptcy.
The front-page headline in today’s AJC print edition is “Door closes on easy mortgages” with the smaller headline declaring that “Folks with faulty credit locked out.”
Yes. True. And is that bad? Not at all. Home ownership is and should be the American Dream, as well as a key foundation of public policy. It makes for secure families and stable communities. Homeowners don’t burglarize their neighbors and, in general, they behave in ways that preserve the value of their investment, a cornerstone of good citizenship.
All that said, however, the recklessness of both buyers and lenders in recent years was a disaster waiting to happen. It’s outrageous that lenders would make long-term loans to individuals without asking to see a W-2 or tax returns to verify claimed income. That allowed borrows to take on far more risk than they could handle, especially with adjustable-rate loans. Allowing borrowers to get into expensive homes with none of their money at risk assured, too, that they’d shut the door and walk away when squeezed. And giving interest-only loans to borrowers who showed no prospect of being able to pay off the loan when due was irresponsible, too.
Lenders could do it because they packaged the loans and sold them to investors. In essence, everybody got the benefit up front with the risk pushed into somebody else’s future.
So the door is closed to easy mortgages and folks with faulty credit are locked out. No problem. Home ownership requires personal responsibility. It requires thrift. It requires contingency planning and all of the other qualities that build financially-stable families and communities.
This last cycle taught irresponsibility. It taught people to think of homeownership as a lottery ticket: Put down the dollar and hope for the big payday. It taught people to grab a lifestyle they couldn’t afford and then to think of themselves as victims when the crash came. It taught people that the didn’t need to save for a dream because some greedy lenders and brokers could fake the paperwork to make it happen. It taught precisely all the wrong lessons.
Now the door’s closed and a brutal market is eviscerating lenders. Good. Sanity’s back.
My great fear now, however, is that somebody in Congress will decide it’s time to intervene to “save” borrowers or lenders.
