Wall Street Journal:: Knock Down Surplus Homes

WSJ's Jenkins: Knock down surplus new homes

The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins argues that:

"Knocking down surplus homes would be the most efficient and equitable way to spend taxpayer dollars. It can proceed experimentally. It can be turned off quickly when the need evaporates. It would not be a lesson to Americans that housing debt is not real debt and need not be repaid. It wouldn't benefit the most irresponsible lenders and borrowers at the expense of responsible ones. The housing market would still have to hit bottom, but the bottom would be higher (and sooner).

"Have no illusions about the alternative being fashioned in Congress. Behind the fig leaves that will be frantically waving, a lending bailout would be effective in stemming foreclosures and propping up home prices only if taxpayer money were used to put speculators' housing bets back "in the money.""

He may be right. But, after the government pays to knock down all those surplus homes built with illegal immigrant labor, shouldn't the Wall Street Journal be ordered to publicly burn all its old editorials about how crucial illegal immigrant labor was to the economy?

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as one commenter said:
OK, so the idea is to knock down those surplus houses using illegal labour. Like they say here in Germany "rein in die Kartoffel, raus aus den Kartoffeln" (into the potato fields, out of the potato fields).

Kind of sounds like the higher math logic of the financial elites, of which the WSJ are just the cheerleaders. Didn't the financial elite get it right with the sub-prime schemes, the hedge funds and the banking system? Oh, I digress .

Yes they do seem to 'relish' extremely wasteful and foolish ideas such as this. But it also indicates just HOW BAD the housing bubble is.