Feds’ hands dip too far already

Its touch perceptible on all points of Americans’ person, the federal government seeks to extend its reach in literal fashion. Thumbing through the 537 pages that compose the Senate’s ill-advised housing bailout one discovers a provision scarcely noticed yet conspicuous: a provision would require mortgage loan workers to be fingerprinted for placement in a national registry. Subjects of this intrusion could include clerks, part-time employees and seasonal workers.
This, backers say, will aid authorities trailing cheats in the system “who perpetuate fraudulent mortgage schemes,” sometimes changing jobs and moving to other states to elude detection and capture, said Ken Lundberg, a spokesman for Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., one of the bill’s sponsors. Those who alter or distort loan records or otherwise contrive and conspire to gain by ill means are legend in mortgage circles. The bill would make life more difficult for cons, particularly those of reduced acumen.
In ostensible purport of shielding the citizenry from a few of the reprobate among its members, federal government frequently responds with Tiananmen dexterity, running bureaucratic roughshod over all in hopes of silencing the sins of a few. Necessitating that one who merely works in a mortgage office be wound through the government wringer lashes the notion of American liberty. Further, it misses the point of the housing collapse. Ex-convicts playing fast and loose with mortgage rules did not drive the subprime collapse. This was fueled principally by two factors, the first, irresponsible lending practices tacitly or explicitly sanctioned by lenders such as Countrywide Financial, and, the second, aspiring homeowners knowingly or unwittingly accepting terms beyond their reasonable capacity to pay.
Responsibility for bad loans over the last decade falls properly at the top and bottom of the lending ladder – on mortgage company hierarchy who failed to police and protect their business and applicants who sought money in excess of what their incomes and credit would allow. Adding a layer to the bureaucracy and another set of government eyes on the people in the form of a national fingerprints database would not have rescued America from the inevitable implosion of subprime loans, nor will it insulate lenders now.
Better known in the housing bill is its provision of $400 billion in taxpayer money to whisk irresponsible lenders and homeowners away from the consequences of their own actions. The fingerprints database and bailout combine to install a mechanism for harassing the innocent while casting a net entwined at taxpayers’ expense for the purpose of preventing the foolish from crashing face first into the floor of their folly. The federal government should stuff its hands in its pockets rather than reaching into ours with one hand and extending another into the private lives of working people.