Home refinancing loans

By my estimate, 80% of the problems with our economy can be laid at the feet of the Democratic Party. The steady advance of their Socialist policies for the past 75 years has slowly but steadily sucked the life, and wealth, out of America. Second mortgages and Home Refinancing Loans are but another symptom of the Socialist disease.

Just twenty years ago, home refinancing was illegal in Texas and generally restricted or disreputable in the rest of the country, and in retrospect, with good reason. There is a sensible argument that says that people should be allowed to do with their home equity what they will, but the consequences of allowing "refi's" and second mortgages has been another orgy of borrowing by average Americans.

This decision was not an irrational one, based on the information made available to the public. Remember, home values have far outpaced inflation for over twenty years. This was part of the "irrational exuberance" Alan Greenspan spoke of in the middle of the Clinton years in referring to the hypervaluation of assets when such valuation defied common sense. Any homeowner looking at the trend could not help but conclude that remortgaging their homes was a safe move, since inflated home prices would more than pay for the new mortgage, and still allow equity to build. And we can debate the wisdom of using our homes as collateral to subsidize our lifestyles - which is what most Americans did - but the consequence has been catastrophic: middle America is now up to its eyeballs in debt and mired in a static or even down-wage economy.

The real kicker: most Americans took out these mortgages just to stay even with where they had been. Successive generations of affluence since WWII had set a certain lifestyle expectation in the eyes of the public, and going backwards was not that expectation. So, wives went to work, people had less kids, and everybody borrowed. Even as Middle America had leveraged itself to the hilt, home values continued to rise and became the obvious target for profit-hungry lenders in search of fresh meat. Lending laws were liberalized if not outright vanquished, and millions of Americans compensated for the exploding cost of health care, education gasoline and, yes, property taxes, with loans on their last remaining asset, their home.