She may be a skilled debater, her policies are still socialist though.
I donno if I'd call her proposals socialist. I'd call them "regulatory". Most people agree that a fat chunk of the economic turmoil we've experienced is due to predatory lending within the housing and credit markets, specifically targeted at low-credit people.
Whether that comes from medical issues or sheer stupidity is irrelevant, I'm sure you've read the boilerplate on a credit card application, or a mortgage. The nasty shit they can hide in there is voluminous.
Nobody ever wants to make that data simple. In the year 2012, when everything is online, with charts and graphs that can be made simple enough for a child to understand, I think its shameful for megacorps to do things like compounding balloon loans, hidden penalties, and robo-signing to expedite foreclosure.
If you want to define transparency and interest caps as "socialist", I guess that's just a difference of opinion.
Personally, I think there should be interest caps. If your credit is too damaged to acquire a substantial loan, it's pretty simple math to see the person is incapable of maintaining the repayment schedule. Therefore, you qualify for less, or none - or you pony up a bigger chunk of the down, as a show of good faith.
I think its absurd to give a quarter-million dollar loan to a 25 y/o kid with $9k down, with one year of job history, making $37k a year. Thats just idiotic. Yet, it happened about 20 million times before the housing bubble burst, which in turn, effected you, and your whole neighborhood, losing 30% equity in - 2 years?
All of that so-called "free market" construction and plastic credit damn near destroyed the economy - much of which was
subsidized, because construction crews often build on projections and collect unemployment in the off-season. The building materials were on business loans, that shit ain't free. And neither is the billions of dollars worth of consumer goods people bought on plastic before they filed Chapter 11 - CC Co's were also bailed-out. (CitiBank alone took $300B).
If those companies can't stay on track, extending credit to qualified borrowers, and building homes for qualified buyers - instead of building whole ghost-town developments in the hopes they'll be bought by sub-prime borrowers, there's a fucking problem when we end up paying for it through bail-outs, and then knocking down the abandoned homes. Thats a shame, really.
Tell me, how many people do you know who managed to "scoop up" a nice new house for $20k? Probably none. With all the people on welfare in this country, living in welfare ghetto shit-holes, they could've gave those houses to thousands of families, for token sums. They'd be generating tax right now. Instead, they bulldoze them, and the lower-income echelon stays right where they are, in ghettos and trailer parks, with antiquated schools in high crime areas.
If you don't think someone with a lick of common sense should try to create policy that keeps that from happening on massive scale, over and over, rather than allow the mysterious debt machinery to run rampant forever, your vision of the free market requires a lot more optimism than mine.
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