Remember I told you that if I had seven hundred billion dollars to fix the economy, I would use it to help homeowners who are caught up in the foreclosure mess – not the slippery Wall Street tycoons who tried to play magic tricks with their mortgages?

Some of you probably muttered to yourselves, being the skeptics that you are, “What does he know? He’s just some old codger with a computer. Our brilliant leaders – people with credentials – know how to do things right, and they say give the money to them and their pals on Wall Street.”

Hah! Commentator Peter Dreier (photo below), who writes for The Huffington Post (you hear it quoted on CNN and MSNBC from time to time), agrees with me. Here’s an excerpt from his article that ran today:

Here’s the problem with the nation’s troubled financial system in a nutshell: Americans don’t have enough money to pay their mortgages.

President Bush’s plan to bail-out the banks by having the U.S. government buy troubled mortgage-backed securities is the wrong way to fix this problem. This is like handing a $700 billion blank check to the people – bankers and investors – whose greed and risky behavior caused the problem in the first place. The right way is to help homeowners who’ve already lost their homes buy them back and to help homeowners on the brink of foreclosure from losing their homes. (And then adopt strong regulations so it won’t happen again.)

And Dreier is not just some old codger with a computer. He is a professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. So maybe you’ll take his ideas seriously. You can read his article at:

www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/how-to-fix-the-mortgage-m_b_130481.html