RUSH: Folks, I, your beloved and respected host, can fix the mortgage crisis with one word: rent. I’ll say the one word again: rent. What is the mortgage crisis? A bunch of people that have no business being given loans to buy houses being given loans to buy houses. There was a time when you and I couldn’t afford a house. What did we do? Rent. And what did we hear? ‘Stop renting. You’re throwing your money down the sewer. You gotta get into home ownership. You need equity and you need to get the mortgage deduction.’
So a lot of us bought homes that we couldn’t afford, became house poor, we lived there, couldn’t do much, had to drive jalopies but at least we paid the mortgage, and if we didn’t they took the house away from us. There wasn’t a Barney Frank or anybody else running interference for us to stay in the house paid for by the neighbors who had no clue what was going on at the time. Rent, spelled R-E-N-T.