YES WE CAN (LIVE OFF OUR NEIGHBORS)

I believe it was Chesterton who said something like "A society cannot subsist on taking in one another's washing." Our President must not subscribe to this as he wants us to pay each others mortgages. He wants us to devote taxpayer money to bailing out large numbers of nitwits who entered into no money down, home "purchases" they could not afford. Many of these people are of a minority persuasion and constitute the lumpen proletariat heart of the Democratic party. So this is a naked transfer of wealth from tax payers to the parasites otherwise referred to as "Working Families" by the Democrats.

But the normally somnambulent American public smells the rat. Obama is learning that hiding pork and growing the government in the midst of a crisis is hard to hide. My guess is that the President will have to scale back this handout or try it by subterfuge. The public isn't buying this and if he tries to bull this through, his public image as above racial politics will evaporate.

Apart from the iniquity of handouts to grifters, a policy of avoiding foreclosure at all costs shows real economic ignorance. Banks can't recoup their loses if they can't re-sell their holdings. Converting an artificially low mortgage payment from a 30 yr to a 60 yr pay out is just a way of screwing the bank in favor of a constituency. And there is no guarantee that the same clowns who got a no down payment house with an interest rate they knew would go up won't default in future, even with favorable terms. Most of these people got in trouble by gambling that the rising home prices would out pace their ballooning interest rates.

The President seems in an impasse over the auto-industry. It's obvious that the automakers can't rebound until the banking mess is resolved. As long as the toxic assets are stuck in the banks windpipes, there will be no recovery and the rest of the economy will continue to unravel.

The President's handling of the economic crisis is maladroit in general. A lot of his dithering may be explained by his reluctance to harm Democratic interest groups. He doesn't want the automakers to be reorganized under bankruptcy protection because that would cripple the unions. With so much money coming from the financial sector, he seems unwilling to nationalize and reorganize the banks.

I wonder if he actually took courses in economics? Perhaps not. With his college transcript under wraps we may only guess by results.