[SoNotHer]

[QUOTE=JAGG;432922] I don't know what you mean by an underwater mortgage. Do you mean people who took out a loan with a bank for an adjustible interest rate instead of a fixed rate ?"

From Wisegeek.com "An underwater mortgage leaves the owner with more debt on the property than the current market value."

You owe more on your home than it's worth, conscripted as you are to "mortgage" (as in the French word "mort," or death, or only after death are free).

You can find a similar definition or find in news stories daily. The last figure I read suggested that folks lost 30% and more of their home's value in the post "boom boom" days that took a sharp right off the cliff just prior to Bush's exit. Inasmuch as a home is most folks' greatest financial asset, this was somewhat painful for working family types but perhaps better news for predatory types.


"As far as medical bancruptcy, it of course could happen to anyone."

The Vegas odds are better for the un or under-insured.

"I think it's important you take measures to insure you're prepared."

So how does that work for folks who were directed to invest in an Enron 401K, or who were counseled to buy a home beyond their means, or whose children were sent multiple credit card offers while still in college or who had the great misfortune of getting inconveniently sick working a Walmart or any job that ensures that you work just up to the point where you are not entitled to health insurance?

"I'm saying you can protect yourself if you don't want that to happen. If you don't protect yourself, then I guess you'll have to make do best you can. That is the responsiblity of the individual."

So really whatever happens, happens and let the free market rule? It's all good, right?

It's funny. We hold children to much different standards than this. If we see a child hitting another child, we intervene. If we see a child take another child's cookie, we stop it and make the child give it back. If we hear a child bullying another child or talking to other children about picking on and setting up another child, we address it and ensure that no child feels singled out or bullied or inferior. We want our children to understand, embody and act out of a sense of goodness and fairness and equality.

And then we become adults and that changes. So what exactly does that say about us, and what does that model for our children?


" Now the mom and pop crisis. I'm sure many will hang me by my eyelashes for my opinion on this but, it's the truth as I see it. My opinion.
If you go into a store and they want 65 dollars for a blanket, you can get somewhere else for 18 dollars, which one do you choose."

And that would be the only measure of cost and value? The comparative retail prices? Beyond the price you see and make a determination on, there are many other costs and prices to consider. And the statistics clearly and consistently show that the Mom & Pop stores not only give back more to their communities in terms of charity, real jobs and taxes, they also happen to take less from their community than a Walmart does in, for instance, in emergency services response and patrol (lotta stuff to watch and prosecute for the shoplifting of) or water contamination and clean up in the river that sits just, unfortunately enough, behind a Super Walmart.

And then of course there's what Walmart allows the community and taxpayer to do, namely take on those medical costs and bankruptcies. Over two thirds of the WM's employees don't participate in the company's healthcare plan. Wonder why. I'm sure it's because they're so abundantly covered somewhere else.

So it's interesting that while you call for more exports and fewer imports, a better trade balance and a stronger American-made economy, you find the justification to shop a store known for selling "Cheap Chinese Crap" because it appears to cost less.

And sadly, that's what everyone's done, which is why the dollar stagnates, China buys our debt (and ours and Canada's prime agriculture, by the way), and the middle class does an amazing disappearing act. "If we're looking for someone to blame, we only have to look into the mirror."

So here we are, many of us, listening to euphemisms like "downsizing" or "food insecurity" or "eliminating redundancies" thrown around, terrified of communism, ignorant of socialism, and falling into the ever widening jaws of carnivorous capitalism and wondering exactly when we hit some kind of economic and social oblivion from which there is no turning back.