Basically, now that lots of the houses that people like them sold are facing foreclosure, they've turned to scamming the occupants with phoney claims of being able to help prevent foreclosure. Read the whole thing -- it provides a good reminder of how widespread throughout the social ladder these charlatans managed to thrive, from those catering to yuppies in San Fransisco to those who delivered loans to the illiterate Central American peasant underclass. Most of the latter were Hispanic themselves.
Similar to the Mexican strawberry picker who earned $15,000 a year but got a $720,000 loan, there is this example:
Three months earlier, [Jose] Serrano, 45, a dump-truck driver at a limestone quarry, says he had stopped paying the mortgage on his $569,000 house ["in Soledad, California, a farm town about a two-hour drive south of San Francisco" that "he bought with a 30 percent down payment of $169,000 in 2005"]. Under the terms of his adjustable-rate mortgage, Serrano's monthly payment shot to $2,500 from $1,618 after his initial teaser interest rate of 1 percent jumped to 8 percent. At the same time, the slowing economy forced the quarry to cut his hours, leaving him with only $2,250 in take-home monthly pay from $3,200 when he worked full-time.
Unable to support his wife and six daughters, aged 8 to 22, Serrano tried in vain to persuade his lender, Aurora Loan Services LLC, a subsidiary of now bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., to change his mortgage so he could continue paying $1,618 a month.
So a dump-truck driver who only made $38,400 a year working full-time bought a home in the middle of Greater Buttfuck for over half a million dollars? That's about 15 years of annual income -- for Christ's sake, the down payment alone was over 4 years of annual income. Probability that he could have ever repaid his mortgage: zero.
After we round up the parasite class and take them out back to be shot, we need new regulations to make sure they can't invade the population again. It could be something as simple as not allowing mortgages to be given for homes that are priced at more than 3 or 4 or 5 times your annual income. If the average person were prudent, intelligent, and far-sighted, we wouldn't need this regulation, obviously -- but then most parents wouldn't have their children inoculated against infectious diseases if left to their own devices, so we compel them to inoculate their kids before they can be dropped off at the free daycare facility called "elementary school."
What we really need is a massive overhaul of the whole incentive structure to encourage smart women into having more kids and at younger ages. That's the only sure path to a population less in need of supervision and paternalism. The problem has nothing to do with education, careers, etc., as the Demographic Transition began in the late 18th C. in France, and a bit later in England, long before women had the right to vote, pursued higher education, or entered the work force en masse. I don't really see a way out of it, so the best we can do is to slow the downfall as much as possible, and the quickest fix right now is to deport illegal immigrants and revive legislation that only allows in immigrants who are quite above the native population's average in intelligence, work ethic, education, and so on.
It may have been a while (generations) before the Demographic Transition turned dysgenic. At the beginning, the association of what we regard as 'good' genes with social class may have been weak. Further, even at the point where the poorer half begin to outbreed the richer, it's likely that *within* the poorer half, the very poorest would still have been marginalized and childless - so that within the poor half of society the net effect would still have been eugenic.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think preimplantation screening will become standard for the SWPL set inside of twenty years. That will lead to a stratification of society, but I don't see how to avoid it.
I think the law used to be that your house note could not exceed 38% of your monthly income. I very well might be wrong on that, but it was 30-something percent.
ReplyDeleteI dont know if its changed, or if the liar loans allowed many to simply "state" their income, or they could "get in" under the ARM -terms and claim they expected higher income shortly, etc.
The demographic transition turned high birth and death rates into low birth and death rates. The more I read about this social phenomenon, the less I believe that there's a 'silver bullit', i.e. one cause or solution only. Even though, the DT predated female emancipation movements, it didn't help female fertility either. All these changes did really effect fertility downwards ever since.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that we need to get real about incentives for high educated women to have more children, but I've only come up with pronatalist child subsidies for every second or third child. Still, this policy is at odds with the way smart conscientious people think.
Would you have more children for a fee of 10000 or 25000$ if your reason to not have children was high cost in the first place? Any sensible person knows that raising children will cost almost tenfold of this kind of money. Smart women are low in time preference, they're not going to be persuaded by a high sum now if it will cost them much more money in the future.
So, I don't know about this policy. We should do some surveys on this demographic and asking them, I dunno, questions as: what would persuade you to have more children? What's holding you back? Waht will make it bareable?
OTOH, Sweden and France seem to be doing something right, because they're both liberal and are bouncing back from decades of low fertility. Whole of North Western Europe seems to be bouncing back from recent lowest-low fertility towards low fertility. Maybe we should study their profiles better.
And, ofcourse, migration realists must take over from the current pundits on left, right and libertarian sides. Continued immigration from the Third World will only make the population problem worse.