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The problem is that too many people get sold a house on the idea that it's a great tax dodge. It's really not, especially when you actually look at the table and see how much money the bank makes compared with how much money you actually get to "shelter" from the IRS.

A lot of the financial and economic realities of these things would be completely transparent to people if they were not so absolutely innumerate. Imagine somebody saying: "Oh, reading anything more complex than Dick and Jane, I never mastered that." Yet I have overheard these kinds of idiotic conversations so many times in elevators and men's rooms with regards to math: "I can't even balance my checkbook." Duh. "I can't do percentages." You're bragging about that? It's taught in third grade.

I see a number of people on this board blaming Wall Street for this fiasco. It's crap. Byron York has a great column on this at National Review Online: Politics and the Fannie Mae Piggy Bank. These people didn't even follow generally accepted principles of accounting -- for at least ten years -- and they were allowed to get away with it. Now we hear from all the commentators about how necessary it was to bail out the bond-holders. Evidently, though, it wasn't necessary to bail out the stockholders -- most of whom were small investors -- and who're going to get mills on the dollar out of all this. Once again, the rich, politically connected people commit crimes and get bailed out, and small investors who thought they were investing in something as safe as a treasury security are getting hosed.

Oh, and by the way, most of those very rich people were Democrats, but Republicans are still branded as the party of the "the Rich." Figure that one out. When Social Security goes casters up, we'll get to read more bilge of this sort: It's both Parties' fault. Rubbish.