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Many pundits and analysts are trying very hard to make this whole mess sound more complex than it actually is.

A mortgage is another fancy term for a debt. Failure to pay that debt means you lose the property that you were not paying for. That property is then sold by the lender to regain some of what they lost when they were dumb enough to loan you the money in the first place.

The solution is very bitter medicine. Let people who don't pay their mortgage lose their homes. Let mortgage lenders who made these bad debts go out of business. Very Darwinian but also infinitely cheaper for the American taxpayer. Considering that people today are not interested in solutions but comfort, I figure my idea has little if any chance of being applied.

How about we let the fit survive and the unfit fail? First, many of the corporations we are bailing out offered sub-prime mortgage rates in the hopes that at some point rates would go up meaning borrowers had to pay even more money in interest. Borrowers many of whom could barely afford the homes they were buying signed up in droves. Rates kept going down and / or were stable while the economy prospered. Now, the party is over and someone must pay the tab.

We are a society that thinks when we in business and our personal lives screw-up the government should come in and spend money to bail us out. Here is a historic example of what just such a policy creates.

Back in the 1990s our own President Bush (Junior) was part of a huge government bailout when he and friends in the Savings and Loan business lost their collective butts for making bad loans that people could not pay back when the economy went into a recession. President Bush (Senior) raised taxes (not new ones) and ran up the deficit to help bail out both dumb borrowers and bad business folks (Junior included). So the lesson learned was that we can keep screwing up without worries Uncle Sam will pay off our financial stupidity.

I see this attitude often in education. Kids think their grades are the responsibility of teachers. I should get a diploma because I showed up (mostly) for the last four years. I signed the mortgage paperwork and qualified for the loan and made payments when I could afford to so, why can't I keep the home I did not finish paying for? I sold people loans they now can't afford. I took a bad business risk and did not plan for the future why shouldn't the government bail me out so I can do it again in a decade? So,

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