Reassesment Crybabies Looking To The County To Bail Them Out

August 6, 2007 by Matt Heckman.

Reading The Reading Eagle, and The Sperm Walentis Blog, I have had it up to here with all of these people who are crying about not being able to afford their houses because of property tax assessment.  You will take notice that the people who are crying are the ones that took out these interest only, and A.R.M. mortgages.  With The Federal Reserve raising rates, and most of the interest only terms coming to an end, these people are adding over $1,000.00 a month on thier mortgage payment.

These same reassesment crybabies are lashing out most recently with Jim Cramer from CNBC with his yelling rant to the fed to cut rates for the sake of these people.  While Jim Cramer is correct that we are on the verge of an economic disaster, we also have to blame this whole issue on just the lack of common sense with the reassessment crybabies. 

I was always brought up to be modest with my lifestyle, regardless of how much you make in life.  Being raised by a single mother, the first value that was taught to me was to live within my means.  Like most kids being brought up by single mothers, I never had all the expensive toys like the other kids in my neighborhood had, or the cool looking swingsets.  I had a rope to swing off of a pear tree in my backyard, and a two seat swing set that my grandfather made out of scrap pipes from when he used to be a pipe fitter.  Naturally the other kids would make fun of me, and insult my mother because my father was never around for me as he left before I was even born.  Naturally as a kid it would upset me, and when I would go to my mother about it, I was always taught to be modest in how you go about life.  You can spend all the money in the world on a game system, a plasma tv, but at some point you will hit a bump in the road of life where you will need money and don’t have it, because you decided to spend it all on your wants rather then invest into your future needs.

I continue to carry that approach in my life.  Even to this day, I would have people talk about their $200,000.00 - $300,000.00 home, how they are living the high life, while my wife and I are renting out a $125,000.00 rancher out west.  Now naturally I’m a grown man, and those types of childish things don’t hurt me, but what is amazing is how very little people mature these days.  Just like in my childhood, those very same people who call me poor and behind the times are now hitting the end of thier interest only mortgages on thier lavish homes, and they can’t afford them.  Now what they want is to have people like you and me who live modestly and still use our brains, to pay higher taxes to these reassesment crybabies in the name of “fairness”, because they know The Federal Reserve will not cut rates.  Diana Olick from CNBC said it best with her latest blog entry, and I quote.

Clearly the credit market needs some help. The fear factor is overwhelming some of the basic fundamental facts, but not all of them. I just worry that if you lower interest rates you’re essentially reversing an important, albeit painful lesson. American homeowners got greedy, bottom line. They saw these low rates, they saw these “exotic” mortgage products, and they bought themselves homes they should never have owned in the first place. Now they’re in trouble, and many of the them should be.

Yes, there was plenty of predatory lending and plenty of illegal and immoral practices going on in brokers’ offices in every state of the U.S., but the bulk of the boom was driven by straight-up brokers with straight-up documents that just happened to offer very cheap money for a short time. People didn’t read their papers, didn’t take the time to understand their investments and now they’re getting burned.

I have to admit I’m torn. People need relief. The housing market needs relief. The credit market needs relief. But is the answer to open the barn doors again and see the rush of blind bulls say, ‘It’s all ok again. It’s time to buy more house. It’s now time to forget what we can all afford again?’

I’m not so sure.

Happiness and respect are not gained through who has the good toys, or the bigger house, it is gained by something that we as a society have lacked over the past few years, and that’s character, and integerity.

Posted in National Politics, Berks County Politics, Uncategorized | Print | 21 Comments »