Hey, Albany! How about a bailout for US? Pay your own bills!
As the federal bailout lurches along (very much a work in progress), revelations abound about how difficult it is to formulate a plan to help those facing foreclosure.
There is the political difficulty in justifying help to those in trouble by using taxpayer money from those who are also having difficulty but managing to pay their mortgages. There is (among many others) the problem of arranging the bailout so shareholders of financial entities holding toxic mortgages are not very adversely impacted and shifty CEOs are not rewarded. Separating these mortgages from the bundles in which they were packaged and sold is also daunting. Confusion reigns!
On the other hand, in New York and other states around the nation, it is very easy to identify the straw that broke the property owner's back.
Chaotic, unfair, excessive, and uncontrolled property taxes that often are as large or larger than the mortgage on a house — certainly an outrageous burden on people struggling to pay mortgages — is a big villain! This fact has been suppressed.
People decry mortgages that are larger than incomes can tolerate. But property taxes that are also larger than incomes can tolerate are directly tied to state government's unconscionable reliance on property taxes to pay for services that the state is required to fund but does not.
The finger points squarely at a major perp: government in Albany.
This dirty little secret has really been an open secret for years. The state's immoral tax policy is a major player in the collapse of the housing market and the defaults on home loans.
Propping up the state's defaulting on its responsibilities to adequately fund schools and Medicaid and other public services is the state's complete reliance on homeowners to pay through the nose for the state's waste and excess.
Homeowners' frantic borrowing and the depletion of equity in their homes in order to pay iniquitous property taxes or face foreclosure (without any state bailout) is a direct result of the state's tax malpractice. The state threw the middle class homeowner under the bus to come up with a clean, if fraudulent, accounting of its stewardship.
When the state cut taxes on the super rich, making a big hole in state revenue — without ever curtailing bad governance — it condemned middle-income homeowners to take up the slack and pay ever-increasing shares of school, county, and local taxes.
The one most effective and long overdue way for the state to try to make up for past taxing sins is also the easiest and fairest in this economic meltdown: Pass our Omnibus Reform and Relief Bill that will place these services — school funding and medicaid and other very necessary state responsibilities — back on the state's shoulders ... back on income where they belong and not on home ownership as a convenient cash cow.
The governors of New York and other states — hard pressed by the meltdown — have asked the federal government to bail them out.
Don't let the state government spend this tidy windfall — which depending on the national election outcome I think will be coming — to pretend to balance their books or hand out tax exemptions to friends or waste money on slick brochures or otherwise prop up their business-as-usual attitude.
Don't let threadbare, desperate attempts to continue slacking off by pretending to stop property taxes from rising (capping at 40% in the next ten years is a solution??) instead of shouldering the burden that is the state's.
Admit it, Albany. Endangering a family's shelter to pay for public services is — what's the word I'm looking for?? — cruel? Immoral? Unconstitutional? Oh right, all of the above, and add CRAZY!
Albany must support the housing market in the state. It collapsed under the added weight of crazy property taxes. Albany must spend its own and any federal money to pay for schools, roads, Medicaid and other public services, taking them off the property tax.
This intelligent, honest use of state funds will give the middle class — specifically the millions of beleaguered homeowners — the right to call their homes their own. Finally.