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Dec. 27, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:36
December 27, 2007, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Al Qaeda now claiming responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Only in the terrorist world is it considered to be a good tactic to admit to murder.
What if OJ had put on a press release?
Yes, I did it.
I mean it isn't normally done.
But understand that in the terrorist world, the entire point is to terrify people, to scare them.
The whole point of terror is to be the bully.
In the first hour of the program, I was talking about the threat to the world of the terror movement and the need to understand how large this movement is and how adamant they are in their beliefs.
The whole point of engaging in terror is to bully and scare people into acquiescing to your point of view.
And if you don't, we'll kill you.
Which makes us even scarier.
So whether or not they actually had anything to do with this or not, they're going to claim credit for it.
Also understand it's not like Al Qaeda is the only terror group there is, although they like to claim that all terrorists are part of them.
Pakistan is a very, very difficult country.
And one of the things that President Bush has not gotten enough credit for how he's been able to balance relationships with a number of Arab nations that have some fairly despicable aspects to them.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is not a pleasant place.
This is a nation where left to its own devices and without the rest of the world looking in, stones rape victims.
It's a nation that's it's a monarchy.
It's ruled by a bunch of kings.
And it represses rights, it imposes its own version of Islamic law.
But they've got all this oil, and we kind of need them on our side in the terror fight against terror.
I think President Bush has juggled that very, very well.
The same thing with regard to Pakistan.
Pakistan is not the kind of country that you're going to put up as a poster child for human rights.
But we can't let it go to the bad guys.
And that means that you've got to tolerate a certain level of immorality over there.
And to pretend otherwise is just not to live in the real world.
The great irony is that they the Democrats keep bashing Bush for being this cowboy and he's going it alone and he won't engage the rest of the world.
It's just not true.
The greatest strength of this administration is Benit's diplomacy.
I know that that's completely contrary to what everyone else is saying, but look around you here.
The juggling act that they we went in and we invaded two Middle Eastern nations.
We invaded Afghanistan.
We invaded Iraq, and we did so without getting the remainder of the Arab world, at least in terms of their governments, to turn against us.
That's pretty shrewd diplomacy.
To simply say that we're going to engage the rest of the world is just pure rhetoric.
What does it mean?
Well, what we've had to deal with is to go into parts of the world in which just about everybody's a bad guy and you've got to pick which bad guy is your friend.
We've gone into parts of the world in which anti-Semitism is the only ideology that exists.
We've simply got to side with those that either are less anti-Semitic than others or don't want to export the hatred to the rest of the world.
Then we've got the whole oil situation to deal with.
Look at Al Qaeda.
The one thing that's helped Bush is that many of these Arab nations, many of the Islamic nations are as terrified of Al Qaeda as we are.
And we've been able to leverage that.
It's one of the reasons why we've gotten Pakistan to be able to play ball with us.
But now in Pakistan with Bhutho dead, you're going to see a desire for revenge from her supporters.
The people who don't want Pakistan to stay in the dark ages forever, and the people who don't want their country to be controlled by terrorists, they're going to blame Musharra for not doing enough to control the terrorists.
They may even blame Musharra for the death of Bhutto.
Well, we've got to deal with this.
We've got to somehow watch what's happening in Pakistan because we don't want Pakistan to fall into the wrong hands.
Let's start with the fact that they have nukes.
Let's also deal with the fact that in addition to all the problems with terror, Pakistan and India still hate each other.
Well, this is where diplomacy comes in.
And I think this administration, particularly since Secretary of State Rice has come in, has done a pretty good job of dealing with all of these things.
Sometimes when I view the Bush administration, I just feel like I'm in an alternate universe, and some of the criticisms that are offered are just ridiculous.
They've stressed diplomacy in almost every area, in some cases wrongly.
All right, I have an item here.
This is earth shaking news.
I hate class envy.
This notion of suggesting that success is something that should be despised, and well, the rich are the rich because they've simply screwed over the rest of the world.
The whole John Edwards approach to American politics.
But I've got a weakness, and I've admitted it on this show in the past.
I admit to resentment of Paris Hilton.
I mean, the woman hasn't done anything productive in her entire life, yet she's able to traipse around and do whatever it is that she wants.
This is a beautiful story.
The old man, the guy that's got all the money, the grandfather, Baron Hilton, he just announced he's going to leave like all of it to charity.
I mean, 98.7, 97% of his 2.3 billion dollars he's going to give to charity.
Now, that's still going to leave a fair amount left over, but it's not going to leave any billions.
Baron Hilton is believed to be worth about 2.3 billion billion dollars.
When he sold controlling interest in the Hilton Hotels Corporation, that was 1.2, and it brought him up to 2.3.
He's 80 years old.
It's his son that married the woman that is what's Paris Hilton's mother's name, the woman that's always, you know, I think the father is named Rick.
Well, that's the son of Baron Hilton.
These are the idol rich.
That's what the Hilton family is.
Well, the old man is probably watching the news the same as everyone else, and he's seeing his granddaughter getting herself thrown in jail, and all the other grandkids seem to be weird, and I'm not giving this all this money they've given them, it's done nothing but turn them into a bunch of twerps.
They're making fools of my family name.
When you think of Hilton anymore, you don't think of hotels.
You think of Paris Hilton.
You think of a simple life.
You think of her getting thrown in jail, you think of her balling.
That's what you think of.
And Baron Hilton has decided that his legacy is not going to be that.
He's going to give it all to charity.
There's going to be like 200 million, and that's it for the entire family for all of them.
Well, there's a lot of these Hilton kids.
You think Paris was crying when they hauled her off to jail?
Imagine this family meeting.
Paris, Nikki.
Granddad just decided to give it all to charity.
I mean, that's beautiful.
Who needs the inheritance tax?
Let's just give these guys, these old guys, just let's just have them give it away.
Imagine if Joe Kennedy had done that.
I want to talk about Texas.
There was a story on page one of the New York Times yesterday.
Sixty percent of the executions in America this year are in one state.
Texas.
But half the states still have a death penalty, but they don't ever use it.
The death penalty in America is essentially over.
For a lot of reasons, states that used to execute people have gotten out of it.
There's never really been a big wave of executions, and for a long time in the United States, no state was doing it.
Then who offed Gary Gilmore in the 70s?
I think Utah.
It was Utah.
And a number of states then moved back into it, and we had a fair amount of momentum for the death penalty as public policy in the 80s and 90s, but even with it, the process that you had to go through in order to execute someone with the number of appeals including into the federal system, it just took so doggone long that very few people were actually executed.
But it became pretty Much a consensus view of most Americans that the death penalty was the right thing to do in certain instances.
Pole after poll after poll showed overwhelming support for the death penalty.
Well, the pendulum is swung back in the other direction, and nobody's executing anyone anymore, except Texas.
These numbers are rather amazing.
Sixty percent of the executions in the United States have occurred in Texas, and it's not like Texas is frying people right and left either.
Do you know how many people Texas has executed this year?
Twenty-six.
Twenty-six.
There have only been 42 executions in the United States.
I mean, you may as well ban it.
At that rate, of all the violent killers, of all the sadistic people who have committed unspeakable crimes in this country, we only executed 42 of them and 26 occurred in Texas.
The only state that hasn't succumbed to this overwhelming pressure to abandon the death penalty.
Well, I say good for Texas.
Who opposes the death penalty?
Two groups of people.
One, posers, those who like to pass themselves off as morally superior because they wouldn't get their hands dirty with something like that.
And people who are soft on crime, that are always more worried about what led someone to become a sadistic killer than the fact that innocent people have been killed by the sadistic killer.
Well, Texas has stood up to this, and I hope they don't back down.
So the New York Times runs this story on page one yesterday, on Wednesday.
So you knew what was coming today.
The left is very, very predictable.
Editorial, lead editorial in the New York Times today.
State without pity, ain't a shameful distinction.
It is a shameful distinction, but Texas is the undisputed capital of capital punishment.
At a time when the rest of the country is having serious doubts about the death penalty, more than 60% of all American executions this year took place in Texas.
That gaping disparity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And now Texas is going to be lectured by the New York Times.
Now the positive part of this is I'm pretty sure most Texans don't really care what the New York Times thinks of them.
I bring this up because the death penalty has gotten wrongly a bad moral name.
I believe the death penalty is a moral imperative.
Every society establishes certain rules, and some rules rise to the level of being made laws.
This is the way that we govern what is acceptable in our society.
If you aren't willing to execute someone, you're saying that there are no acts that would call for that kind of punishment.
Well, I think the way a society determines its morality is how it judges certain behaviors.
And if we aren't willing to use the death penalty in the most extreme acts, we're somehow saying they aren't that bad.
I'm not suggesting we become Saudi Arabia, where you're stoned for being a rape victim.
Thank you.
What I am saying is that the death penalty is a way of telling the world and telling yourself that there are some things that are so terrible that we're going to commit the ultimate act against you.
There are a lot of elitists, including a whole lot of people on the right, who would not be caught dead saying they support the death penalty.
In fact, you never ever hear it.
When you're watching any of the conservative television programs, you rarely read it in the conservative magazines.
Well, yes, those people who support the death penalty, we have to bring them along.
They're part of our group, but you know, they're the great enboss.
They don't know anything.
That's the base.
But we're smarter than the base.
I think you can defend the death penalty on a moral level.
I support it because it's the right thing to do.
Now I don't think it works.
It doesn't work because hardly anyone gets it.
It doesn't deter anyone because most killers know they're not going to get it, particularly if they're not in the state of Texas.
But that doesn't mean in the right circumstances that it's not the right thing to do.
Because it is.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
EIB, Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush Limboss.
So are we getting thousands of phone calls from people in Texas saying this guy is great?
Is that happening?
So the whole reason I'm doing it, this is like some cowboy boot licking.
Get it?
Rush wouldn't have used that line, would he have?
No.
Uh Mark Belling in for Rush.
Let's go to Highland Park, Illinois, and Tom.
Tom, it's your turn on EIB.
Hi, Mark.
You were mentioning two groups that are against the death penalty, but you missed a very big group there.
Um treason's still punishable by death in this country.
And if somebody was out there waging a political revolution to redefine our nation away from the way the founding fathers created us, try to move us into a socialist state.
In fact, a socialist state that would be relinquishing our national property.
Where are you going to go with this, Tom?
Well, fearful of where you're fearful of where you're gonna go.
You're not going to suggest that we execute Hillary.
Is that that's not where you're going, is it?
Well, there's a lot of there's Is that where you're going with just tell me it let's is that where we're going?
No.
What we're suggesting here is that there's been I'm not the only person that would say that the leadership Democratic Party aligning themselves or apparently aligning themselves with our enemies seems to be treasonous.
And if this party is trying to move us away from the way the founding fathers had uh crafted our nation and try to move us into a socialist state aligned with the uh see the thing the thing is, though, Tom, we don't have to kill the Democrats.
We merely have to defeat them in elections.
Thank you for the call.
There are like red flags flying up all over the place here.
And when you're when you're sitting in and doing a national program, you kind of watch out for those red flags.
Whole point of being the guest host is to not screw up.
It's the whole purpose of being a fillin'.
Just don't screw it up.
To Minneapolis and Bill, Bill, it's your turn on EIB.
Hi.
Hi.
Nice to hear from you.
I I had a comment regarding the death penalty.
I'm from Minnesota.
And we have Oh, yeah, you guys execute a lot of people over there.
Yeah, right.
Right.
With all the liberals, you know, we'd be busy a hundred a hundred hours a day, you know.
Uh, but really, um, that was abandoned here in 1906 because um basically uh there was a boxed uh one badly boxed hanging where it took the guy like about fifteen or twenty minutes to die, and uh it almost crossed the river.
And that that scared you guys out of it for a hundred years, then I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't say I wasn't around then, you know.
I I don't have first hand knowledge of it.
I wasn't a witness to it.
See, the thing about it is is that the people who's hang on a second though.
The people who cite opposition to this like to take the high ground.
They think that because they oppose the death penalty, that it somehow makes them better than those people who support it.
The fact of the matter is that most Americans do support the death penalty.
What I think has turned off a lot of people have been these exonerations.
Over the last few years, there have been these projects, usually out of American universities, that find someone on death row and they try to kill them.
And the fact of the matter is they found some innocent people on death row.
And this is scared people.
Oh my God, we have to get rid of the death penalty.
We might execute someone who's innocent.
Well, what they haven't found is anyone who has been executed, who's innocent.
They found a few people on death row who are innocent, but and here's my point on this.
If they weren't on death row, they wouldn't have been exonerated.
Nobody's running around trying to exonerate the people who are serving life.
It's only because they were on death row that you had these busybody liberal attorneys going in and trying to use DNA evidence and other things to clear them.
If they weren't on death row, they'd be sitting in jail for the rest of their lives.
And our fear of executing someone who is innocent.
Well, if you're going to take that standard, then we can't punish anyone at all.
If you're going to deprive someone of their life, you better be right.
Well, if you're going to deprive someone of their liberty, you better be right.
We have people in our country who do unspeakable things.
And we've not been able to deter them because the one thing that would scare them literally to death is off the table here.
The thing that impresses me about Texas Is that they haven't been willing to buy into this disapproval from the rest of the world.
As for whether or not it works, it's never going to work.
It's never going to deter because we don't do it.
And I don't bring this up because I think it's an important issue anymore, because the country's pretty much decided that only a handful of people are going to be executed.
I bring it up because I just think it's past time that somebody stands up and says that it's the right thing to do, that you are morally not only defensible, but you are morally correct if you're willing to say that there are some things that if you do in our world, we're not going to tolerate at all.
We are up against it right now when we live in a world in which one political party thinks you can't even be mean to a terrorist or talk tough to them in an interrogation.
But it doesn't mean that the concept of punishment, real punishment, doesn't have a moral basis.
My name is Mark Belling in for Rush.
So here I am now arguing with the executive producer about the direction that we should take the next segment of the program in.
Well, who's doing the sh who's doing the show tomorrow?
I'm doing the show tomorrow.
Well, you're stuck with this then.
Let's go to Libertyville, Illinois, and John.
John, it's your turn on the Russian ball program with Mark Belling.
Hey, thanks for taking my call.
Um boy, I don't know where to start.
There's so many so many things you're saying that I totally disagree with.
But one thing you did was you contradicted yourself a minute ago when you said that the people coming up with the exonerations of people on death row, first you said it was mostly from universities, and then you said it was do good or liberal lawyers.
And here in Illinois, at least, there was a group of students at Northwestern University, not lawyers, but students, who found that not just a couple people were exonerated as a result of their work.
But I believe it was the actual majority of people on death thrown in Illinois.
Right.
Illinois is a poster child for screwing up the death penalty.
I mean, the y you're right about Illinois.
It's like they cleared everybody who was on death row there.
I don't know what's going on with the court system in the state of Illinois, but they seem to have been convicting a lot of the wrong people.
And what happened in Illinois resulted in a lot of these innocence projects that are going out to demonstrate whether or not people are innocent.
But let me ask you something.
I mean, you said that they're just do-good or liberals.
Don't you think that's actually good?
The people who are unfairly sentenced to death are exonerated.
Is that how is that a function of someone's liberalism?
You asked me if they were do-gooders.
I mean, yeah, it seems like it is good.
I think that is a good idea.
I said it is good.
I said it was good.
I thought you said it was do-good or liberals and sort of a if I said they were do-gooders, I guess that means I was saying they were doing good.
I'm not.
So you thought do good or liberal attorneys were good.
You were you're saying that is a favorable thing.
If they clear somebody who's innocent, yeah.
Huh.
Well, I guess I misunderstood you that's right.
Right.
Now, what does that what does that have to do with the point that I was making that the death penalty is moral and defensible?
Well, it no, it was one to the point you were making about exonerations.
My other point in calling, though, is I think a group of people you leave out who also object to the death penalty are people who actually believe the killing is wrong.
And I don't know if you are deliberately legions of people who claim to be Christians.
I'm saying I disagree with them.
I was not ducking that.
That's the very point that I was making that people who oppose the death penalty do so often on the basis that they have the moral high ground.
I'm specifically addressing that I think they're wrong.
I think their position is not morally defensible.
Now you may disagree with me on that, but that's what I that's what I am that's what I am addressing.
Do you believe that it do you believe that it's wrong to go into Iraq?
I yeah, I do I do believe that it's a good thing.
So you're opposed to that too.
So do you do you think it's it was World War II, our decision to to fight World War II, was that wrong?
No.
No, why is not?
But I'm not sure what that has to do with what you're saying.
I just ask it, I didn't know what your questions had to do with anything.
Why why was World War II not wrong?
But what what you said, sir.
You don't want to answer that question.
The point that I'm making here, which is fairly obvious, is that in some instances the taking of a human life is something that's deemed to be morally justifiable.
I don't want to make this whole death penalty thing sound like a crusade.
However, if you can accept the notion that the taking of another person's life is defensible in some circumstances, self-defense, which almost everyone would agree on, to stop terrible moral injustice, World War II, Which virtually everyone could agree on to fight global terrorism, which the Democratic Party does not agree on.
But if you accept the premise that the taking of a human life is acceptable in some circumstances, then the only debate is what are those circumstances.
And I just find it very, very hard to say that someone like Ted Bundy, who killed dozens of people for no reason other than his own self gratification, didn't deserve to be executed.
That he's somebody that didn't deserve a society to say that there are some things that you can do that we're just not going to tolerate on any level.
And that is a moral position.
Now, people who, for moral reasons, disagree with me have every right to do so.
The point that I'm making is that it's not a one sided argument from the perspective of morality.
And people who defend their position on a religious basis and simply say, well, because this is my religion and it tells me to believe that, that isn't an argument.
The fact that many people who are likewise religious have a different point of view, I think is proof of that.
Now, in the holiday season, the Christmas season, who I always forget who was the savings and loan, the building and loan guy in the Jimmy Stewart movie.
No, no, he was the good guy, Bailey.
Old man, what's his name?
Old man Potter.
I'm gonna be old man Potter.
That sounds good.
First you're defending the defending, now you're gonna come on the program and defend foreclosures.
Well, kind of.
There's a report out today that says that housing prices declined in October 6.1% when compared to October of last year.
That's the largest single decline so far.
Now that's a year to year comparison.
That's not six percent in one month.
That's six percent from October of this this current year to October of last year.
And it's an indication that the decline in housing prices is accelerating.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This sounds like heresy because no one wants to talk about this.
But this isn't all bad.
I'm not saying it's good.
What I am saying is that the decline in housing is not all bad.
Name anything else that when the price goes down, we call it a crisis.
When the price of big screen TVs go down, nobody says that's a crisis.
If the price of food commodities goes down, and they've been soaring for the last two years, we wouldn't say that that's a crisis.
If you go to the office supply store and the price of paper goes down, nobody's going to say that that's a crisis.
But somehow, when it comes to housing, if the price of housing declines, we say that that is a terrible thing.
And I understand why that is.
We are the ones that own the housing.
Best buy in Circuit City may own the big screen television, and we don't care if they aren't getting the same dollar for that product, and we don't care if the manufacturer isn't getting the same dollar, but we own the housing ourselves, and I understand that.
And when you consider that housing is a per is for many people their principal investment, when they see the investment go down, that is not something that they want to celebrate over.
So I do understand that point, but also understand that when it comes to the price of housing, there are two parties involved here.
There are the people who own and there are the people who don't.
The entire time housing was going up here in the 2000s, the naysayers, the people who wanted to reign on every good parade, the ones who want to deny that the economy was recovering under President Bush, they said, well, yes, it's true that housing is going up, but this is making housing unaffordable for many Americans.
They were saying this even as a higher percentage of Americans own their own homes than ever before in American history, partly because we were making a lot of subprime loans.
But they were arguing that housing was becoming unaffordable for many Americans.
They point to certain markets, including a lot of cities on the coast, including many in California, and saying that middle income families were simply priced out of the market.
Well, if that's the case, it looks like the market is adjusting right now.
While it indeed is bad for people who bought right at the top, who are now seeing the value of their home going down.
I'm not denying that that's not bad for them.
It doesn't mean that it's bad for everyone.
There are a lot of people who missed out on the housing run up.
They're getting another chance.
I think we're going to look back at 2007 and 2008 and say this was a great time to buy a home.
We have millions of Americans.
Younger people, people who moved around a lot and just kept renting.
Lower income people who don't have a penny to their names, they're getting an opportunity to get in on the American dream right now.
So let's imagine in grab a city, Kansas City, a house that had been priced at $180,000, is right now going for $168.
That might be the difference to get somebody into a home.
It's not the end of the world when housing declines if that decline isn't going to be permanent, and who thinks it is?
Is there anyone who thinks that housing's not going to ever go back up?
That's this is not like NASDAQ when it hit 5,000.
Housing has gone down in the past.
And while this decline is larger than most, there isn't anyone who thinks that it's permanent.
There are some people who think it's going to get worse.
They think that the 6% is just the beginning of a major downturn.
But if you look at their gloom and doom scenarios, the biggest number you're seeing is 10 or 15%.
In some of the really overheated markets, yeah, things are going down 60%.
If you bought a condo in Florida or you bought a home in a really, really hot market where prices had simply gone through the roof, yeah, those prices are going to come down quite a bit.
But in most of the country, you're talking about a few percentage points.
If the stock market goes down six percent, no one says that's a crisis, we consider it normal.
They even go on television and call it a buying opportunity.
Well, why do we look at housing any differently?
For all the people who didn't jump into the housing market the first time around, perhaps because they thought it was out of control and going up too much.
This is your chance to turn your life around.
For most people, their home is the most important investment they make.
I know in my own circumstance, it's a great savings plan.
When you rent, you take your extra money and you spend it.
When you buy a home, you're forcing yourself to invest in a real asset that's there.
This isn't the dot-com bubble all over again, and yet yet that's how the media is portraying it.
The dot-com bubble dot com bubble was what it was because a lot of people were overpaying for companies that had no assets, that had no value, that had no profits, and they didn't have any products that were going to last for the long term.
Housing is buying land and buying building that's on a land.
There's value there.
And there's only so far it's going to go down before buyers step in and realize, hey, these are bargains.
I think we make a mistake in trying to come up with all of these programs, government and otherwise, to step in and stop the decline in housing prices.
Because there's only one thing that's going to stop the decline in housing prices.
That's going to be when prices get low enough that people step in and say, hey, this is a good deal.
I'm going to buy that house.
And when buyers re-enter the market, things will stabilize.
We will have hit a bottom and housing prices are going to turn up again.
It's the way it's always worked.
What we see here is an opportunity.
And if the value of your house is declined five or ten percent, I'm not expecting you to be happy about that.
What I am saying is that eventually it's Going to go back up.
And we shouldn't be stepping in and taking all of these actions that are preventing the market from working.
This will end when housing reaches the proper level.
And that level will occur, will be reached when people step in and start to buy again.
The fact that this particular commodity, maybe the most important commodity that we have, housing, is now affordable to more people, is only bad for people who paid and overpaid for the housing.
It is not bad for the people who are not yet in housing.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush and the Block.
You know, it occurs to me that the show is almost two hours old and I haven't given out the phone number.
Rush never gives it out, does he?
See, that that's that's the thing.
You never really notice when Rush does it.
It kind of as opposed to this forcing of it.
1 800 28282.
That's the well, I'm the fill-in.
What do you expect?
Uh Mark Belling sitting in for Rush, Mr. Scrooge saying that we shouldn't be doing a doggone thing to stop foreclosures from occurring.
You know why we're trying to stop foreclosures from occurring?
It isn't because anyone cares about the little guy out there who's facing the loss of a house that he didn't put down any money on, or he wouldn't be losing the house.
It's because of who holds the debt.
In the past, a bank issued a loan and was sold on the secondary market.
Now all this debt was bought up by Citigroup and bought up by Merrill Lynch and bought up by Chase and the big banks, the big Wall Street institutions, they came up with all these stupid terms for CDOs, CDO, I think, in that it collateralized debt obligation and they sold it to investors that were looking for a couple of extra points on their interest rate.
Now because they're sitting on some bad loans, we've got to restructure, we've got a refinance, we've got a bailout, and we've got to create this, and we've got to give people an opportunity to stay in their homes without the teaser rates kicking in, all of which is going to stop the problem from being solved.
And the way the problem is going to be solved is when prices get to the right level that people step in and buy.
To Jacksonville, Florida and Matt, Matt, you're on EIB.
Yeah, how are you doing today, Mark?
I'm great, thanks.
Great to talk to you.
Hey, I just wanted to call and tell you that I completely agree with you on this whole housing situation.
This it's basically just the market readjusting itself.
That's all it is.
A friend and I were talking about it this morning, and and we agree.
My wife is huge in the mortgage business, and and we talk about it this whole arm rate uh, you know, postponing the arm rate readjustment on loans and and all these things.
I think if the government gets involved in this, it's just gonna screw it all up.
Well, and the government says it's voluntary, but everybody knows the sec that the Treasury Secretary tried to round up all the major banks to get them in to get them involved in this.
First of all, in terms of the people who supposedly are going to be killed if the adjustable mortgage goes up a little bit, by freezing their mortgage for five years, you're allowing them to be able to stay in a mortgage that they probably shouldn't have gotten in the first place.
The problem with the foreclosures is is that housing prices in some markets are going down.
When you make a mortgage loan at 100% of the value of the house, which a lot of these lenders did because they just presumed that everything would keep going up, well, then the adjustable kicks in and people are now paying more for the home than the home is actually worth, and a lot of them are walking away, or they have to be foreclosed upon because they say it's silly to overpay for the house.
Well, what needs to happen is that lender needs to be stuck with the house, that lender needs to put the house in the market, somebody needs to step in and buy it at the proper price, and things will be taken care of just fine.
In the meantime, the person who didn't have the adjustable, the sucker like me, who got a fixed rate mortgage at I what I thought was a decent rate and has been making my payment, nobody's stepping in and saying that I'm going to get any relief.
We are coming in and we are bailing out buyers who probably shouldn't have bought, and lenders who are creating all of these creative mortgages and financial instruments because they wanted to make money and we shouldn't be bailing them out, and we're going to make the problem worse rather than better.
Right.
And the other side of that is that these people sat down at a table with their lawyers and a title company and signed a paper saying, I agree that my rate is going to go up and I agree to pay it.
Hey, if you buy a fast food restaurant and McDonald's then comes in next door and your value goes down, nobody comes in and gives you a bailout.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I I I know how this hour has sounded.
He's for the death penalty and he's for foreclosures.
See how nutty the right is?
Well, I can defend these points of view.
But most of all, what I'm trying to argue is intervening in this problem will not make it better.
It will make it worse.
If your goal is to end foreclosures and your goal is to end the housing slump, you've got to keep the government out of it and allow housing to reach a level at which people want to step in and buy.
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