[beaner]

The people who make the most noise about the American Dream failing them are mostly young whites who've chosen personal, liberal arts pursuits as a career, with the expectation that society should support them at it.

Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?

You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around you, see what the world is paying for, and do it.

If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you won't get the same pay for it.

Arguments that you should be taken care of the same way aren't really arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view. Which is fine, but don't convolute them.

[olefoo]

> Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?

Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else.

For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR ( every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies.

All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.

All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People.

I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing them the door.

Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as a class, they're killing this country and this planet.

[Karunamon]

I hate to be "that guy" but:

>All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.

Those people share at least the majority of the blame for this. A bank does not put a gun to your head and force you to sign an ARM for a house you really can't afford.

I'd call it 60/40 blame. 60 clueless people, 40 banking sector shenanigans.

Remember that if either side hadn't done what they did, the crisis probably wouldn't have happened.

[ubernostrum]

"I lied to this guy, committed fraud left and right, and violated basically every sound principle of lending that's ever existed to get him to sign on to a mortgage, because I knew I could sell it on immediately into a CDO and face no consequences if he defaulted. But since he fell for it, it's at least as much his fault as mine that it happened!"

Caveat emptor is the disguise force and fraud hide behind.

[yummyfajitas]

Clearly WaMu, Countrywide and AHM (some of the biggest mortgage issuers) faced no consequences from people defaulting on mortgages. Clearly BankAm and Citi aren't sitting on massive losses from bad loans they made, desperately trying to push the losses into future years.

Go read this paper about what actually happened. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421837

It's hard to claim that person A stole from person B if both A and B lost money.

[Karunamon]

And so someone who signs a mortgage for a house they can't afford is completely blameless?

[ubernostrum]

Well, if you're someone who doesn't really know finance that well, who's probably never had a mortgage before and so doesn't know the ins and outs, and doesn't have a lot of friends/contacts who know finance or have mortgage experience...

...and you're getting pressure-talked by a mortgage agent who keeps telling you all about how this has a super-low interest rate for the first three years, and no income verification or down payment required, and that $150k house will be worth $175k, easy, maybe even $200k before the interest rate goes up, and it's a great market so you'll be guaranteed to flip the house in time and make a profit, and real estate always only goes up in value...

...and you give in to the relentless sales pitch and sign the papers, then sure, we can assign a percentage of the blame to you. But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.

(and that's without getting into the bits alluded to in my previous comment, like the fact that many of the lenders knew there was no chance these loans would be good, but were happy to do it anyway since they also knew they'd never be on the hook when the loans went bad, which is out-and-out undeniable fraud and has basically gone unquestioned and unpunished because of "well, everybody was to blame" narratives that try to sweep those inconvenient facts under the rug)

[onebaddude]

>if you're someone who doesn't really know finance that well

Well, you don't have to be a financial expert to understand the generalities of what you can and cannot afford.

The rest of what you describe can be equally attributed to greedy people thinking, "if the price doesn't rise, I'll bail in 3 months. No loss." I know some of those people.

>But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.

I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can't speak english "pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were extremely rare.

The majority were people with $40,000 in income deciding to buy the $750,000 house, rather than the $200,000 house, because, you know, the American Dream says renting is bad and looking wealthy is a necessity. Give me the most money you can for the biggest house possible! This happened across the globe.

Oh, and you're forgetting the other major factor of the American specific bust: people who used their home equity to fund consumption. Mostly boomers. I guess those were also the unfortunate, duped poor, buying vacation homes, jet-skis and third cars?

It seems that your understanding of the situation is drawn from the mainstream, "evil-bankster" meme. But that only works because it's a populist sentiment. There is plenty of blame to go around; give it to the greedy.