Someone please explain this to me. . .

So I am a new home owner, and a proud one at that. Even digging around in my back yard and making expensive home improvements, the whole nine yards. Part of that new home ownership is new mortgage ownership, which I am less pround of, but which seems to be unavoidable.

Mortgate is a simple enough deal, right? Borrow a good percentage of a million dollars with the promise you will pay it back with an even larger percentage of a million dollars, and move in to your little slice of the American dream. Fail to pay it off, and your little slice is foreclosed on, and you lose your home and possibly everything else of value you own.

Easy concept, on the surface. But then they throw all sorts of twists into the bargain, like adjustable rates and sub-prime interest. These things are at best, bad business practices designed to dupe people into buying homes they cannot really afford, and at worst are little more than sanctioned corporate fraud.

But the banks in our country did this stuff anyway. Hooray for capitalism! Lets trick hundreds of thousands of people into buying dream homes they can't really afford, then yank the carpet out from under them and make them both bankrupt AND homeless! As long as the banks make money, right?

Wrong, as it turns out. It seems that all of these people who bought homes they could not afford ended up actually not being able to afford the homes. Imagine that. So there was no money for them to pay. All of a sudden the debt that was in the hands of hundreds of thousands of simple American families was transferred back to the banks that issued the fradulent loans. So the banks LOST money on the deal. Seems fair to me, right?

So please explain this to me - why on earth is the United States Government bailing these banks out? The banks made ridiculous, evil, greedy decisions and prayed on the trust and naivete of the populace and got burned for it. So why on earth should the government save them?

How many of the people who defaulted on their loans, who made their own little greedy, piss poor decisions have been bailed out by Uncle Sam? At my last count, that number was 0. So please explain this to me - the government will pay BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to bail out a bank, but I, a citizen, could not, EVER, expect them to pay 250,000 of those same dollars to bail me out. On what planet does THAT crap make sense?

Oh, and here is the fecal icing on that vomit-cake: the geniouses who tanked the US housing industry and drove Fanny-Mae and Freddy Mac straight into the ground have both been fired. I heard on NPR today that they are both getting severance packages worth millions of dollars. Sounds fair, doesn't it? I mean, if I completely ruined the financial future of my family, and burried us up to our hairlines in debt, I should deserve a payout of at least a few hundred grand, right?

Wrong, once again. All of it is nothing but wrong.