4/15/2010

Bandaids

Another federal program seems to be on its way to failure. The New York Times reported that nearly 3,000 home mortgages that had been modified by the Federal Loan Modification Program have ended since the program started last fall. The vast majority of the modified loans that ended early were because of foreclosure, with only a handful ending because home owners paid off the mortgage, likely because they sold their houses. The problem with the program (and other similar programs) is that they just put a bandaid on the problem. What they should do is get to the root. Taxpayer dollars are wasted on extending the problem, rather than eliminating the source.

2 comments:

Adam said...

If you think that this is bad they are now trying to get another 23billion to bail out the public school system. We have talking in class about how public schools have diminishing returns to scale, laying of techers might actually help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/14/AR2010041402043.html

Dr. Tufte said...

-1 on Elijah for a spelling error.

I think it's worse than a band-aid solution. I think this the government is more like a kid that hurts themselves or others to get attention: they help create a mortgage mess, then they do a half-a**ed job of fixing it.