Friday, October 03, 2008
300 Billion Might Not Be Enough
News blurb with the header, "Low expectations for the homeowner-help program." The first paragraph:
"The federal government's new $300 billion Hope for Homeowners program opened for business today with the intent of staving off foreclosure for 400,000 homeowners in trouble. But we just have to wonder how effective it will be."
Have Americans become so used to seeing the billions of dollars people like Bill Gates have that they know longer have a concept of how much a billion dollars is? Even before reaching for the calculator my brain was saying, "that seems like a whole bunch o' money for each person." To save anyone else from reaching for a calculator (or any unnamed reader that hates math) this works out to $750,000 for each of the 400,000 homeowners.
So let's say it takes a quarter of a million dollars in expenses (politicians, all the bank people and CEOs that put us in this mess, and hiring someone to do the paperwork) for each home to process this that still leaves a half million dollars to help each of these homeowners with their mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place. So giving all these people twice as much as the median new home price might not be effective?
Once again Americans will trod in to the polling places like the cattle they are and pull the lever for "their party" but whichever party that is you can bet the only thing they think about you is that you're too stupid to operate a calculator.
"The federal government's new $300 billion Hope for Homeowners program opened for business today with the intent of staving off foreclosure for 400,000 homeowners in trouble. But we just have to wonder how effective it will be."
Have Americans become so used to seeing the billions of dollars people like Bill Gates have that they know longer have a concept of how much a billion dollars is? Even before reaching for the calculator my brain was saying, "that seems like a whole bunch o' money for each person." To save anyone else from reaching for a calculator (or any unnamed reader that hates math) this works out to $750,000 for each of the 400,000 homeowners.
So let's say it takes a quarter of a million dollars in expenses (politicians, all the bank people and CEOs that put us in this mess, and hiring someone to do the paperwork) for each home to process this that still leaves a half million dollars to help each of these homeowners with their mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place. So giving all these people twice as much as the median new home price might not be effective?
Once again Americans will trod in to the polling places like the cattle they are and pull the lever for "their party" but whichever party that is you can bet the only thing they think about you is that you're too stupid to operate a calculator.
