Participation

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals object when I say we ought to run government like a business.  Here’s an example why we should (from the public land records, nothing confidential, all public information):

 House in the 1300 block of Fremont Avenue in St. Paul sold in 2007, peak of the market just before the collapse.  First mortgage $164,000 federally insured loan; second mortgage $20,000 to Family Housing Fund; third mortgage $3000 to Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.  Fourth mortgage in 2010 for $6,000 to St. Paul HRA.

 House was foreclosed in 2016, bank bid $97,000, sold it this Fall to new buyer for $90,000 using a realtor, for which the bank paid the commissions.

 All told, the public lost about $100,000 on that single deal. 

 Yeah, but it helped out a poor person, right? She had a place to live for nearly 10 years. 

 Sort of.  She made payments on four mortgages – that’s enough to cover a ton of rent – and now she has a foreclosure on her credit report and possibly an eviction on her judgment history.  Nobody will lend her any money now, and no landlord wants to rent to her, either.  So did pouring that public money down the drain really do her any good?

 I wonder if she got a participation trophy?  Seems like the least they could do.

 Joe Doakes

When you make something “worth” other than what people would pay for it on their own, there will be unintended consequences.

One thought on “Participation

  1. This is the kind of argument we need to make more often–“how is all that government ‘help’ working out for you?” I don’t know that I can forgive Obama for missing the obvious implications of this on the South Side of Chicago and the like–if he’d been paying attention, he’d have known that all that “help” was brutalizing the people he claimed to represent.

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