Slumlord Millionaires

So let me see if I have this straight: The Obama administration's proposed solution to the foreclosure crisis is basically to turn it into a massive, government-sanctioned land grab, in which corporations use federal subsidies to profitably rent houses back to the people who used to own them. Awesome.

I'm guessing it's safe to surmise that rich conservatives will not be caterwauling about this heinous "redistribution of wealth," since the wealth is being redistributed upwards.

I love trickle-up economics!

This, apparently, is the best idea an administration deliberately choosing not to focus on tax increases and job creation can come up with to address a faltering economy. And that is very, very worrisome, because getting out of any recession requires more than piddling ideas that stand to make the already-wealthy even wealthier, and getting out of this recession in particular requires creativity and innovation, for reasons succinctly outlined by Austan Goolsbee, the outgoing director of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, last week on Meet the Press:

Now, the, the depth of the recession and the nature of it, that it's coming out of a bubble, that we can't just go back to what we were doing before the recession began makes this particularly hard to get out of. ... It can't be just going back to building residential houses and consuming more than we're earning, which were the drivers of growth before.

In plain language, we can't hope to just get "back on track." The tracks are gone. We need to build new tracks. (Literally.)

Before the recession, our economy was built on a house of cards; now that the housing and credit bubbles have burst, we have to have something new to drive the economy. That might be sweeping infrastructure projects, green technology development, whatever—but it sure as shit ain't turning the foreclosure crisis into a national land grab.