Yes, this is a rant.  My husband hit me at 06:30 this morning with the latest argument he’d been listening to on CNBC the night before--- that the “irresponsible” homeowners who have gone upside-down or else bought homes with an exotic mortgage that they could not have qualified for under the traditional style mortgage and due diligence practices--- should not get any help.  That they deserve what’s happening to them and it isn’t fair to the “responsible” homeowners who have traditional mortgages and are not defaulting.  Yet.

This burns me up, on a number of levels.  

[And a mid-rant disclaimer: we do own a house in the US and as of now, knock on wood, we’re neither upside-down nor defaulting.]

First, there are the many comments on who the defaulters are.  Everyone ignores the facts and has decided that these people are all the same: either evil and lazy or just stupid and greedy, and they have been living it up with flat screen televisions and high-priced vacations at the expense of the rest of us for years.  While there certainly are people like that, I would argue that the mix of people who are defaulting is the same as the mix of people who are not: some hardworking, “responsible” people and some less so.   They’re just people, is all. 

Fact is, most Americans live within a couple of paychecks of the street.  Even the “responsible” ones.  A serious illness, a sudden job loss, that’s all it takes and suddenly someone previously keeping up with their finances just cannot.  Maybe that’s the problem right there--- most Americans living too close to the edge of their means, never mind above their means.   
And what is this “responsibility” issue anyway?  Is it a code for deep-rooted anger and jealousy about the stuff the neighbor has that we don’t have?  And now they’re in trouble and we get to be righteous?  That’s what it sounds like to me, and it’s both an ugly emotion and a time-waster, because it doesn’t address the problem.

Here’s a last one.  The “fairness” question.  Has everyone suddenly morphed into five-year-olds?  As adults, haven’t we learned yet that expecting complete fairness out of life is fundamentally self-defeating?  Why is this one even being discussed?  

And while we’re talking fairness, let’s really talk about it.  Look at the utter economic chaos America has dragged the world into.   Look at the workers at BMW in Germany who had nothing to do with any of this--- being laid off weeks at a time.  What about shoe assemblers in the Nike plant in Vietnam?  Americans quit buying those $100 tennis shoes and those people are just out of work.  Look at the assemblers, polishers, spinners and painters in our own manufacturing facility here in China--- did THEY do anything to “deserve” this economic crisis?  Of course not, but when our purchase orders dry up they reap the whirlwind anyway--- fairness and responsibility be damned.

This crisis and its repercussions is not fair to anyone anywhere.  We have to make our minds up to that and then drop it as an issue.

So let’s address the problem.  Banking and lending practices in the United States have caused much of this problem, and it must be from there that we start to formulate a solution.   But forget the so-called moral high ground of responsibility and abandon the false premise that we can fix this problem for the “deserving” people while serving up a dose of their own medicine to the “undeserving.”  We're all in this together.  Only when we get over this fairness hand-wringing, roll up our sleeves and get to work on the future, start from where we are and look at what’s next, will we be able to use our collective brainpower on the problem and turn this ship around.