Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in a small village in a distant and tiny and backward land . . . No, wait, that’s not quite right.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a small village in a distant and . . . No, still not right.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a large city in this very country there lived three little Piggs. Yeah, that’s it.
Well, it’s almost right. The Piggs were not necessarily little. And there were a lot more than just three. The three Piggs in this tale each represent many millions of Piggs living right here in the United States of America. We will call them Pigg1, Pigg2, and Pigg3, so as to distinguish one Pigg group from each of the other Pigg groups.
Pigg1 was just an ordinary Pigg in that he had a job (well, he did at one time) and he loved his family and he may or may not have gone to a house of worship on a regular basis. Pigg1’s goal in life is to live easy and accept any help offered from any source offering it – especially the government.
For much of his life, he and his family lived in an apartment. It seems he was unable to save enough money for a down payment for a house for his family. That was OK with him, except his wife really wanted the typical white picket fence surrounding their own little plot of land where the little (this time I mean it) Pigg1s could safely run and play. After all, that was the American dream and Mr. and Mrs. Pigg1 were nothing if they were not dreamers.
Mr. and Mrs. Pigg1 had both received a fine education in our government run education mills. By the time they had graduated they had learned how to read (as long as the words were short enough), how to do arithmetic (with a calculator), and how to ask for help in filling out employment applications, unemployment applications, and general welfare applications. They had also learned that the government is the solution to any problem they might encounter.
In addition, Mr. Pigg1 had learned to put cars up on blocks so he could fix them (maybe) and to do some general repairs of a lot of things as long as he had plenty of duct tape. The apartment manager tended to complain a lot about the car on blocks but Mr. Pigg1 ignored the complaints.
Mrs. Pigg1 had learned how to cook. She always spent the food stamps on fine convenience foods from the grocery department of the local Catchpenny store. She didn’t have to make the food go a little farther by adding fillers of bread or water (depending on the food in question) because the little Pigg1s were getting breakfast and lunch for free at school.
One day Mrs. Pigg1 heard about something called a no-doc mortgage. This had nothing to do with health care. It turned out it was a mortgage that would allow the Pigg1s to finance a house without documenting any income or assets. And why not? They deserved it. After all, Mr. Pigg1 still had a few months of unemployment coming and rumors were that the federal government was going to help the state extend that for several more months – or at least several more weeks. By that time Mr. Pigg1 would surely find employment somewhere – maybe. Also, the payments were going to be quite low on the APR mortgage as interest rates were very low. That’s because the FED kept pushing them down instead of letting the market set the rates.
Mr. and Mrs. Pigg1 agreed that this was certainly better than paying rent. So down to the local no-doc bank they went where they discovered that the government was ‘encouraging’ the banks to give these no-doc mortgages. These were also known as NINJA loans – No Income, No Job or Assets. (more…)