Yes you heard it right. If I'm not allowed to disagree w/ CAR and NAR somebody please warn me. The following is going to explain my position but I'm not going to break out any charts here. I believe in a free market and competition. Those two things create jobs, keep prices down, and create opportunities. When we as a government subsidize any industry we take away the free market influences that are used to maintain a productive and efficient industry. We also continue to reward those who can not run a successful organization. We have seen government organizations in the past become more and more inefficient and we have recently witnessed financial executives laugh at in the face of the taxpayer and use our tax money to pay out bonuses that were not earned or deserved.

Let me focus on the real estate industry before I lose you. Our industry got so caught up in making everyone a homeowner that we forgot that there are instances when the market drops. Consecutive years of double digit gains was one strong sign that this might happen. The availability of money and the easy underwriting guidelines made it possible for many to purchase a home. People who never would save money all of a sudden did not have to and they were able to get into a home with no vested interest. Hindsight is 20/20 and we all know now that this was a formula for a real estate crash. Of course there wasn't any government intervention because tax revenue, spending, and homeownership rates were climbing at a fast pace. Did anybody say wait let's allow for salaries to climb before we allow prices to continue to rise? No because who needs a wage when we have the availability of credit (sarcasm). Well the banks made sure to take that away at the first signs of a downturn just creating a snowball affect that eventually turned into an avalanche. Now we have this aftermath and the government feels like it is their responsibility to spark the economy. That's what government intervention does, it sparks the economy and once the flame gets going the government is supposed to pull back but the government never does it just continues to grow and grow to the point that it's so obese it's now taking food away from its taxpayers to keep itself alive. Wait I forget that we are a country that has grown used to living on debt and our government runs the same way.

We are now very dependent on countries like China to keep on funding us. We have enslaved ourselves to the Chinese. We now have a master and servant relationship instead of two super powers co-existing. I am not saying that the Chinese are evil I just have so much pride in our own country that I would love to see us be completely independent. In my opinion it would give us a stronger foundation for our economy.

Prices had already dropped significantly and combined with low interest rates the housing market was starting to see a rebound. Many renters waited for the market to come back down but because of the tax credit they now are competing against thousands of other buyers that would not have bought. I have had buyers that continue to lose multiple bid situations because the homes are selling for market value or they are competing against all cash offers. I am sure that this is not the same in every area and some areas are harder hit then my market. For those areas that are harder hit I feel for you but the government needs to focus on job creation before they focus on increasing values of homes. I don't mean to sound like the line in "Field of Dreams" but if they create jobs the home buyers will come. In the end our government needs to figure out how to get the money paid back for the tax credit and you guessed it, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Taxpayer will have a higher bill. The higher tax bill will result in less spending which will result in company lay offs which will probably result into another recession. I apologize for the run-on sentence but the government is driving me crazy. Let's get back to the days where we were held responsible for our own actions and if we took risks and failed then the failure was really just a lesson learned. We would bounce back stronger and wiser. Lord only knows I have my fair share of mistakes but I am still plugging away.