Political Quotes

“Indeed, one of the areas hardest hit in the entire country is southwest Florida, in and around Fort Myers. I note the Senator's comments are very accurate. We need to find a way for people to stay in their homes, afford their payments, and see what that does not only for the individual homeowner but what it does for the neighborhood. It keeps people in the homes. The weeds don't start growing. The values of the rest of the homes in the neighborhood don't plummet because the house is now vacant and perhaps ransacked. There is kind of a spiral downward when people are forced out. So we need a program that would come in and make the mortgage as affordable as the homeowner can work out. Yet we find, in many cases, the banks don't want to do that or there is not a governmental incentive for the banks or the homeowner to do that. We have missed out on that. Several years ago, when this crisis started, I implored the Secretary of the Treasury to look at exactly what was happening, and they came up with a program whereby they were going to give some cushion of 5 percent of a mortgage that was underwater. In the Senator's State and my State, if a home is just 5 percent underwater, you are rather fortunate because a home today 20, 25, and 30 percent underneath the value of the first mortgage is not uncommon. That is the problem we have not addressed. There have been some other good things. There are now programs coming out on small business, in trying to get money into small business.…”