Stimulating

Today, President Obama signs the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, and tomorrow, he will visit Phoenix, "one of the cities hardest hit with foreclosures, where he's expected to outline a $50 billion to $100 billion plan to help homeowners."

The plan will almost certainly involve convoluted tax credits, mortgage readjustment schemes, and other unnecessarily complicated programs to help homeowners which will require billions in administrative costs, result in various fuck-ups and failures by the well-intentioned people tasked with connecting programs and the people who need them, and generate a new generation of predatory scams, as these things always do.

If the government just outright paid the mortgage of every struggling family making less than $[insert dollar amount here], it would be the same amount of money but exponentially more valuable to all of us. The direct help would yield immediate results for the families at risk of losing their homes, which would in turn stop the freefall of home values affecting other homeowners and put cash back in the banks who will then be able to grant more credit to new homeowners and businesses seeking lending, more individual resources would be freed up to be spent in retail and service vendors, blah blah blah.

And the reason it won't happen? Because the federal government always insists on wasting enormous amounts of time, energy, and money trying to make sure that it doesn't look like it's giving anyone "an undeserved hand-out," instead of telling the caterwauling fucknecks who bark about nonexistent welfare queens to STFU.