You ignore the horrible economic conditions inherited from the previous Democrat regime, making it necessary for Volker to jack up the rates to attack and then cure Carter’s stagflation.
It was tough medicine but it worked and helped produce one heck of a strong economy.
Ignore? Hardly.
When I was young and just married, the highest mortgage interest rate permitted was 6 per cent. Anything higher was unlawful usury,criminal. A good savings account got 2% per year. Veterans on the GI Bill got mortgages for 4 per cent. That's when everybody that wanted a job had one, and the cost of anything was less than one tenth of what you are paying today on food and other commodities. Then, you got a T-bone steak for $1.00 a pound. A box of Wheaties was 35 cents.
You know nothing. I was buying a two story home, divided into two apartments, and paying one hundred dollars a month at six per cent, $9,000 for it, paid off in ten years. My wages were less than $80 per week. I rented one of the apartments for $55 a month, and lived in the other with my wife and two kids, at the age of 24 years old.
Serving my six years of national military obligation in the New York Army National Guard, honorably discharged in 1962. Taught myself two semesters of engineering calculus that included analytic geometry, passed a test on it, and was invited to matriculate at a State University Engineering College, where the tuition and books were free. All math done with the slide rule that I had to pay $4 for. No computers then. Graduated with top grades, and got a job as a Research Engineer at the then top rate of $7,200 a year.
Since then, things have only gotten worse. Apparently, you haven't lived in the time when graduating engineers had to turn down beautiful offers to take the best one of them.
At graduation, I sold off my house, paying off the contract amount, then taking away $3,000 equity from it. That was 1962, having paid on the house for 4 years.
You can't find any opportunities like that at wherever inflation and government spending has taken us.
Today, people are thinking that a 7 per cent mortgage is horrendous. Bunch of fools, my FRiend. Hoe you're not being one of them.