Does anyone have any election experiences or memories worth immortalizing? Read on for one of mine.

The night of the election, duv and I couldn’t watch the TV with the rest of the nation– we had our Japanese night class. Before we left for the class, it looked like Obama had won, since the remaining votes should fall in a predictable way– but you’re never sure until it’s official. In the middle of the class, we received a text message from duv’s mom informing us that McCain was giving his concession speech… let’s just say that the rest of the class knew, very shortly, that Obama had won. *grins*

The underlying problem is, house prices are *way* over-inflated. Inflation-adjusted, they peaked at *double* the historical norm, and all this mess started when they came back down just 10-30% (regional). There is a generation of people who honestly believe that house prices don’t go down, and have made grave mistakes in their personal finances as a result. Nation-wide, house prices above about 3x the median hosehold income aren’t sustainable, and we’re still about 5x (and of course far worse in the housing bubble cities).

While there were certainly a subset of loans that were just bad – forged docs, impossible payments, etc, and that’s what’s causing this month’s crisis, the problem is much deeper. There’s an entire culture now of buying a house with a mortgage payment of 80%+ of your take-home pay, counting on cashing out equity every year because “house prices only go up”. This isn’t a problem the government can fix.

Sure, the governement needed to intervene to avoid a market panic, but really it just needed to “make a market” in these mortgage-backed securities, to allow them to trade at a value not absurdly depressed by that panic. That’s not a $700B bailout, that’s just splitting the difference between buyer and seller.

Long term, however, house prices are certain to fall back to sustainable levels, and anyone thinking “we just need to put this problem behind us so house prices can start rising again” is in a dream world. The governement isn’t going to solve that problem, and shouldn’t try. Do the minimum to stop the panic, and get out.
-lgw

What do you all think?

America is full of decent people, who could never believe their own government could become fascist. So were Germany and Italy in the 1920s. But they became fascist anyway. They passed laws suspending civil liberties, but the government promised the frightened populace that those laws would only be used against targets like “Communist terrorists.” And, a little bit at a time, the target kept getting bigger and bigger, slowly enough that the people who weren’t paying close attention never detected it.

And, next thing you know, there were millions of people dead! So, it turns out, it would have been worth paying attention after all.

I’m shell-shocked. The U.S. just seems doomed to me some days.