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 In my humble opinion, the one thing that McCain is right about (as in even a stopped clock is correct twice a day) is to propose restructuring (aka refinancing) the "subprime" mortgages into fixed, low rate ones. He stole that idea from me. And the Obama camp, caught with their pants down on this one, since McCain is making the more "liberal" proposal, reacts stupidly to say that this is "just rewarding the greed of the lenders."
No. The bailout already does that. It transfers $700 trillion in additional debt to the taxpayers, plus interest to be paid by the taxpayers, to the institutions of wealth, orchestrated by Goldman Sachs. That is already a given and a done deal (more or less).
What needs to be tacked on to that, as McCain (i.e. whoever writes his positions for him) correctly proposes is to at least get to the root of the problem and help some ordinary, not-wealthy people, by stabilizing those crazy ballooning mortgages into fixed rate ones. If you are going to bail out the super-wealthy, what is wrong with bailing out people with middle and low incomes (i.e. those who were tempted by lenders into taking the "subprime deals") in one fell swoop? It is not only ethically more correct, but actually does something to stabilize the economy. No brainer.
McCain is right on this one, Obama is wrong-- probably because at this point everything has become action-reaction, and about "winning points" (not to speak of "dueling bullets").
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There are two problems when discussing the McCain Surge idea: First, the plan sounds a lot like Obama's on the surface - but it isn't really. Second, there are two McCain plans. He posted one on his website and then people told him it was unworkable so he changed it the next day. Here is a story about the first plan:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/10/08/mccain_mortgage_plan/index.html
Here is a story about the revised plan:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/10/08/mccain_mortgage_plan_2/index.html
As I understand it (and I wouldn't say I have a firm handle on this, but I'm beginning to get it), what it comes down to is that you can't really buy people's mortgages because they've been repackaged into other securities and re-sold several times. After realizing this, McCain backtracked and said no, the government would buy the mortgages at their original face value - which is 1) impossible and 2) not a benefit to homeowners, who really need refinancing at reasonable rates.
Because the mortgages have been repackaged ("securitized"), the best way to deal with the problem is to give bankruptcy judges the power to help homeowners get refi.
This is why Democrats tried to get that power written into the bailout bill, but Republicans raised an enormous stink about it.
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Paula