Civil Frights

I’m trying to figure out when credit became a civil right.

I was taught that credit was something that one acquired after years of hard work, saving money and being financially responsible. When you had accomplished all that to the satisfaction of a bank, they would give you a credit card. If you didn’t screw that up after a while, them might give you a car loan. If you paid that off in good order, you might be able to qualify for a loan for a house.

Somewhere along the line, the government decided that everyone should have credit and dictated things like the Community Reinvestment Act, in which everyone could get loans for big ‘ol houses that, in the end, they couldn’t afford.

Which of course led to mountains of loans going bad. In what I consider to be an effort to cover their asses, the government rewrote the act no less than eight times and pressured the banks to toss out anything resembling sound financial practices, especially the Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie and Freddie.

In the end, it led to our current mess, which is still be exacerbated by the government belief that credit is a civil right and everyone, no matter how fiscally irresponsible, should not be denied.

Seriously. Despite the fact that subprime loans were the fuse to the economic bomb, the government still marches ahead saying that subprime loans are a wonderful thing to have in our economic system.

The lack of common sense that has been going on for decades is ghastly and recently the liberals have been all up in arms denying that the CRA was harmful and typically blaming everything on big business, Republicans or the rich. But you know what? The actual blame isn’t just on the government; it’s on the idiots who took out the loans that they couldn’t afford. It’s a simple formula:

• Your total bills are X a month
• The loan you want is Y a month
• You take home Z a month
• X+Y cannot exceed Z

Anyone who can’t figure that out is not only too stupid to get the loan, but probably too ignorant to have a bank account. Maybe they should have an IQ test on loan applications as well as everything else they make you fill out.

Getting a loan for something you can’t afford is not a right. Freedom from discrimination, freedom from injustice, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law, those are civil rights. Having a gold card or a jumbo mortgage is not.

The sooner the government stops wasting time on political boondoggles and gets around to protecting our actual civil rights, the better.

Tags: act, civil, community, Congress, cra, credit, economic, investment, mortgage, obama, right, ruin, subprime