Passive Voice

I told my two co-workers this morning, both of whose first houses were bought a few months ago, that their homes were really bought back in 2006. Effectively. That's the effective price they will have paid once they factor in their 2008 price and their future tax increases to pay the government to bail out all the bad loans of 2001-2007.

Passive voicing? Yes. Lately an awful lot of dialog in the passive voice was heard by me regarding the financial meltdown:

"Mistakes were made."
"We were blindsided by these bank failures."
"It got brung to us."

A taxpayer bailout is not exactly what I envisioned back in 2003 when I expected the housing bubble to pop. It hung on, remarkably, for almost another 4 years, but any damn fool could see this coming a hundred miles down the road. How long could we have expected the median family income unable to purchase even 40% of the median house?

I really have never given much thought to the taxes I pay. I always withhold more by filing single zero so I never even see it. If I really cared, I would have never spent the past eleven years paying off my mortgage early, opting instead to take the interest tax deduction and funneling that cash into other securities. I have twenty six months left. Wa-hey.

While I don't care about how much I pay, taxes would be used in different ways under an Insania administration. NASA -- bump them up about 85%. Federal highway funds -- down 62%. Indigent health care -- up 23%. Wetlands preservation -- up 26%. Tax credits for Transit Oriented Development (TOD), and tax increases if you don't. How about a thirty year renewable energy financial policy, instead of jacking it on and off every coupla years?

No. Instead of NASA, I've resigned my future taxes to fund bad consumers who bought bad loans from bad banks who sold bad collateral debt obligations to bad investment firms and bad insurance agencies who underwrote bad policies to insure them. And I feel so much better!