This Land is Your Land: A better way to spend $1 trillion
Take a hike, China.
guest column
By Rich Rodgers of Portland, Oregon. For 11 years, Rich was a policy advisor to a Portland city commissioner on housing policy, school funding, environmental restoration, and public safety. Prior to that, he studied the effects of regional growth management on housing prices, and worked in the Oregon Senate as a research assistant. At Yale University, his history thesis focused on the lack of community involvement in decisions to construct major public infrastructure in historic African-American neighborhoods in Atlanta. He now works in the private sector.
The US government is proposing to spend at least $1 trillion of taxpayer money to bail out failing financial institutions. There is no talk of bailing out struggling home owners, just the banks and investors holding bad mortgage debt and associated derivatives. There is no guarantee that this massive intervention in the market will stabilize things, and there is no chance that the typical American family will see any direct benefit from the plans being proposed today. It’s the wrong way to fix these problems.
We need a new approach. We need a 21st Century Homestead Act that writes off these bad debts and gives every American household their own home, free and clear. We can do it, and we should. It will cost us less in the long run, and put us in a much stronger position going forward. It needs to be done with a close eye on fairness and the interests of our key global partners, but it should be done.
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guest column
By Rich Rodgers of Portland, Oregon. For 11 years, Rich was a policy advisor to a Portland city commissioner on housing policy, school funding, environmental restoration, and public safety. Prior to that, he studied the effects of regional growth management on housing prices, and worked in the Oregon Senate as a research assistant. At Yale University, his history thesis focused on the lack of community involvement in decisions to construct major public infrastructure in historic African-American neighborhoods in Atlanta. He now works in the private sector.
The US government is proposing to spend at least $1 trillion of taxpayer money to bail out failing financial institutions. There is no talk of bailing out struggling home owners, just the banks and investors holding bad mortgage debt and associated derivatives. There is no guarantee that this massive intervention in the market will stabilize things, and there is no chance that the typical American family will see any direct benefit from the plans being proposed today. It’s the wrong way to fix these problems.
We need a new approach. We need a 21st Century Homestead Act that writes off these bad debts and gives every American household their own home, free and clear. We can do it, and we should. It will cost us less in the long run, and put us in a much stronger position going forward. It needs to be done with a close eye on fairness and the interests of our key global partners, but it should be done.
--MORE--