Working Together for No Good Reason

If you want to look for victims in the foreclosure crisis, it’s not hard. Elderly homeowners, first-time buyers with little experience in the mortgage market, people with modest incomes, immigrants who might have limited English skills - all became targets of predatory lenders at the height of the housing boom.

But….builders? The ones who cashed in on the boom by putting up homes as fast as they could? The parties responsible for all those subdivisions that sprouted up suddenly in the middle of nowhere?

The Senate, in deciding to act on the mortgage crisis, chose Wednesday to come to the aid of builders with $6 billion in tax rebates, making them the biggest recipients of federal aid in the entire package.

It’s great that lawmakers finally are coming to an understanding that homeowners need help. As we noted Wednesday, even conservative economists and Wall Street are starting to argue that the foreclosure crisis is so bad the government needs to step in and begin buying up and refinancing subprime loans.

But no one mentioned a pressing need to bail out Toll Brothers.

It’s hard to watch both parties congratulate themselves on bipartisanship when they worked together to do something that doesn’t begin to address the crisis right in front of them - the homeowners facing foreclosure.

Economist Dean Baker had the best summation of the Senate move in today’s Washington Post: