I was recently forwarded the following email from a friend of mine who is a Republican:
I recently asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?'
She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'
Her parents beamed.
'Wow...what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my patio and driveway, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.'
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?'
…to which I replied, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.'
Her parents still aren't speaking to me.
This is the kind of thing that I want to discuss on this blog, because it is the kind of thing that is almost convincing. I'm a pretty liberal guy and when I first read this I couldn't help but think for a few moments... hey, why doesn't the homeless guy come over and make that $50? The answer is simple; because even though he may be completely willing to pay his friends cute little daughter $50 to do chores, the gentleman who wrote this email is never going to go to the homeless guy at the grocery store and make that same offer.
It is a common tactic of the conservative movement to downplay social programs as counterproductive because they reward laziness. I recently saw a clip of a CNBC correspondent named Rick Santelli making a rant about the Obama administration's plan to subsidize mortgages in danger of foreclosure. He called the people who hold these mortgages "losers" and turned to the group of wall street traders he was standing in front of and yelled to them "do you want to pay your neighbors mortgage?" and of course got a huge response, with people booing and shouting no; it was a great dramatic moment that, again, has the ring of truth and makes you feel that these lazy socialists are trying to steal from you. The main thing that you need to forget if you want to be a good capitalist is your sense of empathy, let's try to remember empathy for just a few moments and see what it's like to be in the shoes of the homeowners in question.
Imagine for a moment that you are in the market for a home, you've got less than perfect credit; but you've been approved for a mortgage (which the bankers will refer to behind your back as "sub-prime") you decide to buy because the economy is good and the bank (who must know what they are doing) has decided that you are responsible enough to be a homeowner. So it's a year later and suddenly you start hearing a lot about sub-prime mortgages and foreclosures, the market's not so good anymore and you yourself may have lost some money in the stock market as a result (you most definitely did if you listened to the advice of Rick Santelli or any of his associates at CNBC) So now because of this recession your home is worth much less than it was when you bought it, so even if you sold it to pay back your mortgage you would still owe the bank money. Unfortunately, the only way out of this for you is bankruptcy and foreclosure.
Now let's start thinking like good Americans and be greedy for a second. This loser we're talking about is going to make us pay for his home one way or the other, so doesn't it make more sense to subsidize the mortgage anyway? Think about it, if we subsidize this mortgage so that this guy keeps his house, it prevents him from claiming bankruptcy and the bank from foreclosing on his home. This in turn helps prevent the fall of housing prices in his neighborhood (which is actually the cause of the current recession) and helps prevent a further decline in the economy. Not quite as stupid as it sounds to subsidize the mortgage, rather than you "paying your neighbor's mortgage" (which is misleading anyway since the plan to subsidize won't actually cost you anything extra in taxes) you are actually preventing your own home from losing equity and helping keep yourself from falling into the red.
