Mortgage Crisis and Student Loan Debt

Dear President Obama,

I was happy to hear you say in the State of the Union address that the solution to the mortage crisis is for lenders to refinance the existing mortgages at today's interest rates.  But I'm not happy at things I'm hearing in the news about you supporting forgiving loan debt.  I don't think the banks who made inappropriate loans should be able to hide behind the reduced home values as an excuse to not refinance and not help homeowners lower their payments, and then to take their homes.  At the same time, the homeowners willingly took on the debt and should have thought about whether they could pay it.  For this reason I am strongly opposed to any of the debt being forgiven.  If you do that you are saying that everyone should have bought these houses whether they could afford them or not.  Forgiving the debt is not fair to the people who acted responsibly and didn't take on more debt than they could handle. 

I feel the same way about student loan debt.  My daughters were outstanding students.  I'm middle class and couldn't afford Ivy League schools and didn't quality for financial aid, so I told them they couldn't go to those schools.  They went to the best school they could get an academic scholarship to.  If you forgive student debt now for the people who took on debt they couldn't afford and can't pay back you are saying to me I should have let my kids pile up $100K + in student loan debt.  I knew better and acted responsibly and I/my kids would be the losers in that scenario.  Wrong message and wrong incentive system.  Let people learn from their mistakes!  And above all don't teach them that if they are irresponsible, the government will bail them out!  I'm a democrat, but I  believe in responsibility and I thought you did too. 

P.S. I loved everything about your State of the Union Address, except I disagreed about opening up all the offshore oil and gas reserves to leases.

Sincerely,

Tammy