Letter to my Congressman

To the Honorable Kevin Brady:

I'm just wondering what Congress is going to do for me, a person who paid cash for her last two cars (one every 10 years!), pays off her one credit card bill in full every month, and makes her mortgage payments on time so she can continue to live in the modest little house that is well within her means.

We are apparently going to use my tax money to bail out a lot of stupid, greedy people who bought more than they could reasonably afford, and who seem to think the world owes them a big screen TV, a couple of Wii's for the kids, and a new car every two years.

Then we're going to use more of my tax money to bail out the greedy, multimillion dollar businesses that extended credit to those other greedy stupid people and then gave themselves big, fat bonus checks so they could go buy million-dollar mansions in fine, gated communities (where, boo-hoo, they may now be having trouble making their payments, if there is a God.)

Meanwhile, the IRAs & 401(k) that I've been putting *my* money into for the last 25+ years have given up all of their value over the last few weeks because everybody is scrabbling to get some piece of whatever's left of the money in the world.

And instead of a big, fat mortgage that could have a principle reduction if I didn't pay my bills, I have a reasonably budget-able mortgage and a chunk of equity that may or may not be valuable when it's time to sell. I don't see anybody offering to reduce *my* mortgage principle as a prize for being *smart* and *sensible* when the real estate gal was trying to convince me that, "Well, sure, this is a nice place but you could afford so much more!"

I guess I am just annoyed that we are rewarding foolishness instead of taking care of the people who pay their taxes, put money into savings, pay cash and generally do things the *right* way. And I ask again, "What is Congress going to do for *me*?"

Sincerely,

Stephanie A. Weiss

The Woodlands

(sent originally via Write Your Rep, and I encourage you to write one, too) 

P.S. I have already received two new credit card applications in the mail this week, which started today.  This suggests to me that the credit market has not shut down, and if I were a Congressman, my first new Bill would raise the postage costs for credit card applications, with all the resulting revenue going toward paying off the unfortunate $700b nonsense that you people agreed to provide last week to keep the market from tumbling, which it did anyway. Nice work.