This bailout may be "minor" in terms of economic impact, but its a MAJOR slap in my face. If we had gone for an ARM with an intro rate when interest rates were at record lows we could probably be saving thousands in interest payments through Bush's plan, depending on how they view the incomes of a teacher and a financial aid worker.

Silly me, I thought the low fixed rate was the safe and prudent way to go.

You say:

"Don't buy a home until you are 30? I made over a year's salary on my home sale before I was 30 and now pay a mortgage on a home that i can afford..."

Read literally you bought a house you couldn't afford, but got out before you had a problem. You had carry costs on your down payment, any additional equity, insurance, maintenance, etc. Then you had leveraged risk. Do you think your risk adjusted return was worth it? You cannot say everything was cool because in the end it worked out. That's what this is about. People assumed prices would always go up and now they're loosing a year's salary.

How exactly adding an addition risk (that of the loan agreement being arbitarily re-written to suit political pressure) going to ease the credit crunch? In my mind, this move is likely to make credit even scarcer.

Meanwhile, those of us who read loan terms, do the right thing, don't look for bailouts, buy what we can afford or wait until we can, can only draw one conclusion.

The New AmericaTM will never let you suffer for your own greed, incompetence, or selfishness.

I referred above to baloon borrowers as stupid, but who's the fool if there's no penalty to getting loans I can't pay for stuff I can't afford?

Keep it up America. Keep looking for Government to protect you even from the stupid things you do to yourself, and eventually, we'll all be entirely protected from Freedom of any kind.

But right now, I have to look into getting myself a big baloon mortgage, cause I don't want to miss out on the big cash bailout!

Don't buy a home until you are 30? I made over a year's salary on my homesale before I was 30 and now pay a mortgage on a home that i can afford - I could have bought a home twice the size the one I am in now, but that would 1) be dumb b/c I don't need it 2) too expensive. maybe I will just refinance, take out all the equity, and buy lottery tickets.

I've decided that I'm against guard rails on highway curves, because they waste my tax dollars to protect people from their own bad choices.

Presumably, though, there's some limit to what you're willing to invest in this regard? If guard rails were a thousand times more expensive, you'd likely be against them? Or at least ration them more prudently than is now the case?

And people go off the road for all manner of reasons, most of them not related to poor driving. Getting into a cheaper mortgage with a teaser rate, by comparison, is always a conscious decision made over a relatively long period.

Bonus points for Dubya!

Unfortunately we can't complain about the politicians, since we are getting policy the public demands. Nothing bad can happen, and if it does it must be the government's fault, not bad decisions by citizens.

Duh. :D

Either the next president shall unfreeze it before 2012 if everything has corrected itself, or if (s)he see's (s)he's in trouble, (s)he won't unfreeze it, and let it be something to debate during election runoffs and drop it in the next electee's lap once he's elected.