Can the Stimulus Package Help Susie American?

Last week in class, we discussed an average scenario that the majority of Americans are living today. This is the scenario of Susie American. In case you don’t remember, Susie was a single mother of two who bought a house for $100,000 and then later used the home “flipping” strategy to sell the house for $150,000. After selling that home, Susie hoped to do the same with another. But the bank told her that with a loan, she could buy a $200,000 home. With Susie’s reasoning, she had thought that she could make more money buying the $200,000 home because the interest would grow faster with a more expensive home. Unfortunately for Susie, and many other Americans, the price of the home did not rise as expected, but it greatly fell because too many people, like Susie, took out loans from the bank that they could not afford. Then, because the entire country was in financial turmoil because of situations similar to this, Susie lost her job and was left with a home she could not pay for, a large loan that she could not afford, and two children to provide for. The question is, what are the government and president going to do to make Susie, and millions of Americans like her, become financially stable again?

Obama’s new housing plan unfortunately does not focus on the many Americans like Susie, instead, according to cnnmoney.com, the plan focuses more on helping around 9 million people that owe more than the home’s value, but can still afford the payments. Unfortunately, “The program does virtually nothing for the unemployed, who often don't have enough income to make any reasonable monthly payment affordable” (Luhby). This is very unpleasant news for Susie and a large mass of Americans who recently became unemployed due to the financial recession that the country is currently in. However, the article did later mention that those who were currently unemployed could potentially benefit from Obama’s bill in the future because Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package “is expected to create or save up to 3.5 million jobs” (Luhby). After reading about the stimulus bill, this appeared to be the only benefit to the large amount of people living with similar situations to Susie.

This seems to be a very terrible thing for the majority of Americans, and I hope in the future, there will be a bill that focuses on helping the mass of Americans instead of the small amount the this bill supposedly helped. Unfortunately, this bill realistically may not appear for months, or maybe years. Therefore, I suppose that one important thing Americans can do is look at what exactly caused the housing market to crash and the economy to fail, and learn from our mistakes, ensuring that it never happens again. Until the next bill, focusing on a greater mass of Americans, arrives, it seems that all Americans can do is become self-reliant and attempt to solve their own financial problems. As mentioned before, this is an unfortunate situation, but one that can be solved with several bills and efforts that will hopefully arrive in the future.