A question for you Liberals.Follow

Honestly? While I certainly do believe that people who have never supported themselves financially are going to tend to have a different view about subjects like this than those who do, I didn't go there for a couple of reasons:

1. It ends up just being a personal attack. Disagree with me if you want, I do tend to avoid just calling people names or making fun of their life circumstances as a means of "winning" an argument. I just think it's counterproductive.

2. Pensive has shown a pattern in the past of thinking in broader terms than I intend when I write something. I tend to focus very specifically on the subject and context being discussed, and intend terms used to be taken in that context and on that subject. Pensive will occasionally respond with a broad philosophical response like "all reality is thought", which may be interesting and sometimes even thought provoking, but usually isn't what I meant when I used the word "think" in the context of whether people think that dogs are smarter than cats.



I just assumed this was an example of the second case. I said that social policy should not trump financial policy. I meant social policy in the very direct context of spending money to achieve specific social objectives (like helping poor people own homes). He took it in a broader "social good" sense (at least that's what I assume). Thus, he responded with a "money isn't more important than ethics/morals/good".


I just meant that it doesn't do the purposes of those social policies any good if we bankrupt our country spending money on them. All social spending should be subject to the availability of money in our economy, and the relative value we might place on different things that money could do. It's simplistic to say that "helping people own homes" is more valuable to society than "helping rich bankers make more money", but it's not generally what's really going on. As we can see from the results, the real cost of spending that money on helping people own homes is that we caused a financial crash which resulted in a rather significant percentage of US workers becoming unemployed.


It was not really a choice between poor people owning homes and rich people having more money. It was a choice between poor people owning homes and other poor and working class people having jobs. The social policy question isn't a clear there, is it? And that's before looking at the numbers of "poor people" who actually gained the ability to own a home via this spending and didn't get them foreclosed on. And of the remainder, how many of those loans weren't for the poor at all, but developers or investors also just looking to make some money flipping properties? How many were people who could have afforded normal loans, but due to the common practices in place were shunted into sub-prime loans unnecessarily, some with big balloon payments (also in many cases unnecessary) and/or ARMs, who were then advised to refinance on the equity of their homes, effectively going more into debt over time instead of less, who now find themselves upside down on their loans and owing more than the homes are worth by a pretty large margin?


Those aren't good social policy results either, are they? I should perhaps have stated that a "single social policy" shouldn't trump financial solvency, but I thought what I'd said was clear enough. In any case, I still stand by my statement as it was intended and am more than willing to clarify that intent if asked.

Ask not what capitalism can do for you, ask what you can do for capitalism!

Except that "social policy" is not synonymous with "society".

Yes. Are you aware that "financial policy should serve society" is *not* a reasonable response to the statement "Social policy should not trump financial policy"?

Can you understand why? Because that's twice I've seen essentially the same semantic game played to respond to my earlier statement.

False.

The goal of NINA type loans was not home ownership.