To inject a little "devil's advocacy" here, let's try to picture what our world would be like if the government had not started the VA/FHA lending programs many decades ago, and had not done so many things since that time to encourage home ownership.
If the government had not been aggressive in this manner, then we would have a growing proportion of renters everywhere we looked.
Have you ever noticed the overall differences, generally, between the quality/maintenance/appearance/market value of rental properties vs. owned properties?
Would we, personally, prefer that neighborhoods be dominated by rental propertiess, rather than owned properties? Would we, personally, want our opportunities to purchase and own homes and gain the tax advantages thereof to be restricted? Worse yet, would we actually want to be beholden to landlords (AAAAAAACK!!!!)--these cats would take over the world.
Economic growth would be substantially slower, as there would be fewer purchases of goods and services from Home Depot, furniture/carpet stores, appliance stores, roofing contractors, lawn services, and so on. Every time a home is built and sold, workers in (probably) thousands of different occupations participate positively in the purchase.
A related and more worrisome home ownership issue is that American workers no longer can count on working for the same employer, in the same location, for many years--thus dampening their confidence and ability to buy real estate for the long term.
The employment picture has drastically changed in recent years--companies aren't loyal to workers, and workers aren't loyal to companies. Changing jobs several times in one's life is more common than working for the same employer for a lifetime.
Perhaps some time in the far distant future, the issue of not just employment, but stable employment, becomes a topic of debate. Workers need to be able to count on more job security than they seem to have these days, or both families and our economy will suffer, in my humble opinion.
It's not necessarily a good thing that a declining number of employers actually offer pension plans, rather than stock-market-based retirement plans. Now that the stock market has sucked up the 401K's of millions of Americans, some people might conclude the "present system ain't workin'".
Perhaps someday the pendulum will swing back to where people DO tend to work for the same company for a lifetime, and employers, rather than the employees, once again manage the pension programs. This is a pretty radical line of thought (downright socialistic in some respects), but we live in radical times, NO? |
