Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Open Letter to the President and Congress

I subscribe to several progressive mailing lists. Through those sites, I get lots of "sign this petition" or "donate money" or "write a letter" solicitations. Now I am far from progressive, but that's ok. Sometimes I agree with their topic, and participate. For example, I've signed anti-war petitions and sent anti-war letters to the San Jose Mercury. Sometimes I got solicited and I have the opposite viewpoint. I respond to those too, as that's part of why I subscribe to these mailing lists.

Today I got an email soliciting me to write the President and Congress on bailing out homeowners who are being foreclosed. I'm pretty sure that I was supposed to support more aggressive bailout maneuvers, but of course I advocated just the opposite. Here's what I wrote:

The last seven years have demonstrated the inherent problems with the Federal Reserve System. An attempt to soften a recession lead to massive debt and yet another unsustainable boom. Once again we find ourselves at the beginning of an economic correction. Will we continue to make the same mistakes as in the past? Will we try to soften things again, but this time by spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out failed speculators and foolish home buyers? Please let the answer be no this time. Let speculators fail and let homes get foreclosed. It's the only way for the market to correct itself and reward the people who did not make bad decisions by borrowing more than they could repay. Our national debt is so huge and the dollar is so weak, don't make things worse by wasting the tax dollars of future generations on the irresponsibility of the current one.

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