He tried telling me these are the ones who caused all the current crisis in housing.
I asked him if he recalled when President George W. Bush was promoting the concept of the ownership society when he was running for re-election in 2004.
He said he couldn't remember it.
Don't let them forget about it.
----------------------------------------
http://www.newsweek.com/2008/10/10/end-of-the-ownership-society.htmlEnd of the ‘Ownership Society’
(Page 1 of 3)
by Zachary KarabellOctober 11, 2008
Remember the ownership society? President George W. Bush championed the concept when he was running for re-election in 2004, envisioning a world in which every American family owned a house and a stock portfolio, and government stayed out of the way of the American Dream.
These families were, of course, conservative, or at a minimum traditional and nuclear, consisting of a heterosexual married couple and at least two kids living in a stand-alone home with a yard, a car or two and a multimedia room with a flat-screen television. The latter was a new addition to this 21st-century simulacrum of the 1950s "Leave It to Beaver" idyll. But the dream was the same.
Such a country would be more stable, Bush argued, and more prosperous. "America is a stronger country every single time a family moves into a home of their own," he said in October 2004.
To achieve his vision, Bush pushed new policies encouraging homeownership, like the "zero-down-payment initiative," which was much as it sounds—a government-sponsored program that allowed people to get mortgages without a down payment. More exotic mortgages followed, including ones with no monthly payments for the first two years. Other mortgages required no documentation other than the say-so of the borrower. Absurd though these all were, they paled in comparison to the financial innovations that grew out of the mortgages—derivatives built on other derivatives, packaged and repackaged until no one could identify what they contained and how much they were, in fact, worth. snip
But eventually, it all went sour. By the turn of the century, the proliferation of easy credit and universal stock ownership combined to create anything but a conservative society of thrift. Average household debt levels are now higher in Britain than in any other major country in the developed world. In the United States, the shift away from corporate pensions to 401(k) retirement accounts plunged millions more into the equity markets and loosened the traditional connection between companies and workers, which was one element of that 1950s dream that conservatives like Bush conveniently forgot. The ownership society of the 1950s was anchored by a labor movement that made sure that workers received something resembling their share—remember Truman's Fair Deal? The deal for the past eight years has been fair to merchants of capital, and then some. But to the tens of millions on the receiving rather than originating end of those mortgages, fairness has been in short supply.
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