Dear Dirty America

This rationale for continued lack of action has always been hard to swallow, because it involves defining taxpayer interest in an absurdly narrow way. Do taxpayers love picking up the tab for governments mowing scraggly lawns in front of empires worth of homes relinquished to foreclosure? Are taxpayers pleased to be paying for police forces chasing vagrants, partying teenagers and prostitutes out of abandoned buildings? Where do these costs get factored in? Who pays for the domestic violence, child neglect and basic psychological damage that flows from having so many communities ripped apart by the foreclosure epidemic, with families camped out in grungy motels, sleeping in cars and piling into homes of friends and neighbors on an itinerant basis? If holding firm in the face of such strife amounts to good value for taxpayers, the FHFA needs a new form of accounting.

And now we know that this supposed tough treatment of homeowners in pursuit of taxpayer value is is not only wrongheaded, it’s also fiction. In the reality version of American life, what Fannie and Freddie care most about is the enduring affection of people running major banks — the same banks that helped trash the economy and screw taxpayers.