Chris Dodd for President

Dear Mr. Dodd,

Your recent pronouncements regarding preserving “the American dream” while seemingly noble are exactly the wrong thing to do.

I and my family moved to Los Angeles at the peak of the housing bubble. We could have easily taken one of the risky mortgages, bid outrageously high price to buy a home to secure our “American Dream”. But we refused to join the madness and decided to preserve our financial integrity and took a responsible course by renting instead and wait for the market to cool down. So here we are two years later, when it looks like the inevitable correction is happening and sanity is being restored to the market the Democrats like you are proposing a government bailout to interfere with that process. Where were you when the madness was going on? I am sure you were aware of the madness, for it was widely reported in the press. You are like a parent who did little to stop the alcohol from being served at a teen party and are now trying to be heroes by preaching virtues of no alcohol to teens.

My wife and I work very hard to not be able to afford a house here in LA. Yet it is out of reach for many of us because the high home prices propped up by the irresponsible lending and borrowing. For two years we have seen people make financially irresponsible decisions to buy a house be rewarded in the form of tax deductions on the mortgages they could not afford. Many of these people are not innocent victims that you make them out to be. Many were motivated by greed of the double digit appreciation in home prices. Now you are adding an insult to our injuries by proposing to use our hard earned tax dollars to help them. You talk of preserving the American dream, how about the American dream of millions who have been priced out of the market and are patiently waiting for the prices to fall?

How do you propose to make sure that the bailout will not help the rich investors who took the risk and lost? Instead of asking Fannie and Freddie to intervene in the market, you should be heeding the advice of fed chiefs Greenspan and Bernanke and working to reform them by putting strict limits on their portfolios and reducing the risk they pose to the financial markets. Finally, you are setting a bad precedent by bailing the investors and borrowers and sowing the seeds of the next bubble, perhaps a bigger one.

Let people be responsible for knowingly or unknowingly making bad financial decisions. And stop punishing the people who took the responsibility and made the right choices. For that is the American way.

Ketan Parekh