Now that rates are going down again thanks to the Fed's panicked lowering of their target rate by 125 basis points in less than a week, refinancing mortgages is again becoming a popular and smart choice. There's a problem, however. After getting reamed recently for giving out too many mortgages to people with bad credit partially at the behest of politicians and the press who thought every American should be able to own a home, mortgage companies are upping their standards, so now we get headlines on CNN like, "Refinancing: Only for the Privileged Few."

So if you're a mortgage company, you just can't win. Either you give mortgages to ever bad credit case that walks in the door, and then are blamed as greedy, evil bastards when those people can't fulfill the loans they signed for, or you only give mortgages to people with good enough credit to remove doubt about their ability to pay, and then you're an asshole for not helping the poor and less "privileged."

But you know what? That's such BULLSHIT. First off, you don't have to make very much money to have good credit, you just have to not have too much debt, and pay off the debt you do incur on time. So the difference between "privileged" and "non-privileged" has nothing to do with how much money you make, but whether you are responsible about your money or not. And CNN thinks mortgage companies and the responsible should take it up the ass for those who spend more than they earn. This is a bad attitude, and the kind of thinking that leads to a lot of bad social policy.