We certainly should be trying to help underwater homeowners as a simple matter of fairness. We bailed out Wall Street billionaires, it seems a pretty minimal proposition to offer assistance to homeowners who bought into a bubble that all the top economists insisted did not exist.
—Dean Baker
Underwater Homeowners Cannot Explain the Weak Recovery
Whle I agree with the first part of the statement, I disagree somewhat with the part about the homeowners. Maybe my own life means I’m a bit biased, but why should the government bail out homeowners and not renters, people in substandard public housing or the homeless? Home owners are far more likely to be better off financially then renters, who are better off than people living in motels who are better off than the homeless.
It is beyond outrage that the bankers were the first and only people to get a bailout, but there is a lot of people out there who could use a bailout and I don’t see homeowners as being more deserving than other populations.
@Andy – I don’t think that Baker means that his statement should be taken as exclusive. The argument of the article is that on the macro level, underwater homeowners aren’t the big deal that many claim. Baker is very much a liberal (I think he spent his last vacation building homes for the poor with his wife). One of the more notable things he writes about is welfare for the rich. In particular, he notes that our society is all for globalization when it comes to factory workers, but when it comes to doctors and lawyers and college professors (he’s a college professor), we are protectionists.
I think he is the most important economist in the public sphere. Interestingly, he gets much more coverage in the UK. Do a search here on "baker"–I write about him a lot. ("Dean Baker" probably won’t work because I have the worst search engine ever invented!)