When "Homeowners" are Really Just Renters

I'd like to be clear on a point that relates to my previous post.

If you put $0 down and only pay off interest on a mortgage, you are NOT a home owner. You are simply renting. The fact that you signed a 20-30 year lease with no control over what your rent is was a dumb idea.

You are not being foreclosed upon and losing your home, you simply cannot pay your increased rent and need to move somewhere that is affordable for you. You never owned a piece of that house.

That said, the bailout is an absurd concept for either its intended or actual use.

It was intended to help give free money to people that cannot afford the mortgage/rent on their "homes". Why do renters get no support for being responsible and not entering a 30 year lease they cannot afford?

The actual use of the bailout thus far is to give free money to banks who helped create this financial nightmare in the first place via predatory lending and absurd leverage rations of 30:1.
Banks of course do not deserve this money and by giving it to them, we have only set the precedent that they should be irresponsible in the future. It's a great deal, bankers profit on the way up (capitalism), and we pay on the way down (socialism).

The best part is that instead of helping the economy have enough money to qualify for legitimate loans, we gave the money to banks at a very low interest rate or for free, so they could then loan us our own tax dollars at 14% interest. So at best, we are being scammed by the government and banks for our own tax dollars, and at worse they are just keeping the money and refusing to give out loans altogether.

To review: You pay taxes --> Government gives your taxes to banks --> Banks give you back some of your own money at a high interest

Wait to go Mr. Paulson, just because you live in an outdated and failed model for the finance world, it doesn't mean that a financial TARP solution is the best way out of the current mess (it's just the only idea you could come up with).

In the future, if we really consider banks (and car companies) too big to fail, then they need to be broken up into smaller pieces before they are able to be some important. Just as we deny mergers to prevent monopolies, we must not allow banks or any other company to be so big that they cannot "fail". If the short term growth of the company and the stock markets is limited, that is a small price to pay for responsible long term management of the country and our finances.