re: #182 Gus 802

Overall I learned over the years that the president doesn’t affect everything in this country including the economy. The same holds true with the current sitting president especially with regards to the now global economy. It’s a fact of life that some people refuse to accept and people expect quick and magical answer to problems that took decades to appear. The current habit is to blame the government for the economy. This flies in the face of record profits being posted by a number of industries and corporations while trillions of dollars in capital is being sat upon by financial institutions.

Yeah but it’s not a zero-sum game. Certain parts of the economy can be booming right along and other parts can be sucking donkey nuts. You can’t blame one industry for making record profits for another industries failures. The housing industry is no one’s fault but the consumers who were willing to pay for a commodity they thought would continue to go up forever, and for Bush and congress at the time for trying to make it way too easy for people to get into houses under the misguided idea of the “culture of ownership.” People acted like it was a right to own a home, whereas my wife and I lived in apartments while she finished her pharmacy schooling and even then waited until we had enough in the bank to cover us if something should go wrong, and enough to put a decent downpayment.

0 down on a house is not a good idea, because people then treat it like a rental and just walk away, killing everyone else’s property values in the process.