Zach is feeling the icy fingers of the recession gripping his throat. He’s a small-business man with a retail store in New York and an investment in a small apartment renovation that hasn’t gotten a buyer. Suddenly, his income is down by 25 percent or so. He has a mortgage on the house in Brooklyn where he lives that he used to be able to afford, but now he’s dipping into his savings to the tune of $2,000 or $3,000 a month to cover his costs, and he’s worried.
So he called his mortgage bank to see what might be done. The answer was: not much, certainly nothing from any government plans to help homeowners get through the crisis. And for Zach, who’s never gone to the government for anything before, there’s a larger point in that fact.
To wit: If you’ve behaved responsibly and prudently all these years, you’re on your own. But if you’ve made colossal mistakes of greed and misjudgment ”” either by selling billions in mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay you back or by being one of the people whose eyes were bigger than their wallets”” you might just get rescued, at the expense of taxpayers like Zach.
The situation is that the “reponsible middle” is not a sure source of votes for the politicians controlling the legislative and execitive branches of government.
Those politicians will take measures that will lure the votes of the “irresponsible” because that’s where the votes are.
You see, its all about being re-elected and pushing an ideological agenda at the same time. For those politicians, its definitely not about the sort of policies and actions that have traditionally best served our country.