On home foreclosure rescue legislation

Certainly people who were deceived by predatory lenders should be helped. But what about the people who were complicit--who knew they were stating income and assets they didn't have? What about the ones in it for a quick buck--the house flippers?

And in the biggest picture, what about all the people who chose to live far, far from their workplaces in order to get a bigger home? What they did was perfectly legal and understandable, but as a nation our landscape has been build around cheap oil and the idea of pure residential areas from which one drives (often a vast distance) to where one works. We can address this with a very expensive but necessary train network like Europe has, but ultimately people need to live near where they work, in communities that combine these functions.

So bailing out all those people who want to hang onto their distant-from-work homes isn't in the national interest. I realize how much personal pain this means, but weaning ourselves off oil will entail mucho personal pain no matter what we do or don't do.