Paying price for greed

The meltdown of the American financial system has generated a lot of finger pointing.

There’s an old saying: When you point one finger, you have three others pointing to yourself.

So while Democrats blame Republicans, Republican blame Democrats and we all blame the “fat cats” of all political persuasions, the fact is every American who has lived beyond his or her means can count those three fingers pointing back at them.

The “crisis” may have crested in the last few days, but it has been building for years. As credit restrictions lowered and “no-money-down” bargains abounded, those who thought they’d latched onto a deal almost too good to be true are finding out now that they were, really, too good to be true. Too many Americans grabbed it all without the wherewithal to pay for it.

Shady lending practices, ridiculously loose credit requirements and a whole lot of avarice have gotten us where we are today. Americans are losing their homes, defaulting on credit card debt, claiming bankruptcy, losing their jobs and wondering what the future holds.

Gov. Sarah Palin has warned that there could be troubles akin to the Great Depression from this latest correction in the market. “Black Tuesday,” the great crash of 1929, was preceded by rampant speculation, too.

We aren’t economists. We aren’t historians. We are journalists. We can’t use this space to predict what will happen or give sage advice to our lawmakers and policymakers how to fix the problems that will affect everyone in the nation.

But we can, with the common sense we’ve been given, give a good, hard shake to everyone — from the corporate giant with a golden parachute to a debt-ridden minimum-wage worker with more maxed-out credit cards than days of employment in a month — who has lied to themselves, failing to believe their poor financial decisions would affect not only themselves, but their neighbors.

As Congress, President Bush and his cabinet try to hammer out a multibillion dollar bailout package, we’d like to know how much each of us will be paying for those golden parachutes. What is our bill for fraudulent lending practices? And as some in Congress would add extra funds to keep people in their homes, we wonder how equitable it is to keep people in the same homes they couldn’t afford when they bought them, and expect taxpayers at large to foot the bill.

We know we are in for some hard times, and as always, those more economically challenged will likely suffer the most. While we must protect those we can, we also have to be realistic about helping those who have lived beyond their means and dug their own financial graves with a shovel called greed.