Michelle Malkin has a story today that is so amazing, I just couldn’t pass it up.  It is about the creation of a “Fine Print Czar”.

She is commenting on a story from Breitbart.

For your own safety – put all food and drink down.  Empty your mouth.  Proceed.

President Barack Obama asked Congress on Tuesday to create a new agency to police the fine print on consumer products like credit cards and mortgages and determine what fees, penalties and interest rates are fair.

I hope that I am not the only one who saw how ridiculous it was for Obama to be concerned about the “fine print”, when Congress is so busy signing legislation, that they can’t be slowed down by pesky constituents asking them to READ THE BILL before signing.

This year, alone, they passed the porkulus package, the largest spending bill ever in our history, without reading it.

And, this week, they passed the Crap and Trade bill, which will allow gov to tell you how much water and energy your family will be allowed to use, again without reading it.  We know that they didn’t read it, because even the talking head whose name is on the bill admitted that he hadn’t read it.  In addition, the original bill was 1200+ pages.  They added another 309 pages at 3 am, the day of the vote.  No one who voted on the bill could possibly have read it.

Maybe they thought that you were too busy watching Michael Jackson to notice.  And maybe they were right….

Back to the Fine Print Czar

The Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be in charge of regulating those products in the same way other government agencies regulate the safety of drugs, food and toys.

Obama said Americans are demanding it.

“Those ridiculous contracts with pages of fine print that no one can figure out—those things will be a thing of the past,” the president said in a statement accompanying the 152-page draft bill. “And enforcement will be the rule, not the exception.”

….Under the plan, lenders would be required to be up front about their products and compare them to less risky, “plain vanilla” options. The agency potentially could require a kind of warning label on such financial products as mortgages with payments that suddenly balloon in size.

I am laughing, also, at the bottom paragraph.  A warning label.  Snort.  For those of you who either didn’t have a mortgage or who signed their mortgage years ago, let me remind you of a couple of items.

1) There is already a warning label – it is in the title of the mortgage.  You can have a mortgage with a large balloon payment at the end – these mortgages are BALLOON Mortgages.  The title of the mortgage tells you it will have a balloon payment (unless you thought that there was a clown after your settlement handing out balloons). 

There is another “evil mortgage”.  The ARM Mortgage.  Another one that has been criticized as being sneaky.  Again, the name of the mortgage – Adjustable Rate Mortgage – sums up what will happen.

2)  Every mortgage has a Truth In Lending (TIL) form that must be signed.  This form is a one page summary, the breaks down the terms of your mortgage.  The interest, the actual interest, the actual amount of money you will pay back to the back assuming that all payments are on time, the length of the loan, whether there is a prepayment penalty, the late date, etc.

So, aren’t there warning labels already in existence?  And isn’t it time that we demand some personal responsibility from people?  If you are not able to read your mortgage and fail to ask questions about what you did not understand, shouldn’t the burden be on you?

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

View Technorati blog reactions.

Related Posts