American Insanity: How to Buy a Home in Martha’s Vineyard with Zero Money Down

The absurd new housing bubble created by Banana Ben Bernanke’s cheap money, private equity slumlords and crony foreign oligarchs looking to launder their ill-gotten funds, continues to provide what would be hilarious headlines if only they weren’t so sad.  In the following story, we find that courtesy of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the struggling folks on Martha’s Vineyard have access to zero money down home loans.  The USDA you ask? Well, it turns out that the “entire island is designated as a rural area eligible for a USDA loan.”  Why do we even have a government at this point?

From CNBC:

The zero down mortgage is back—in Martha’s Vineyard.

Ira Stoll at the Future of Capitalism bloghas come across an article on “Home Buying 101” in the spring of 2013 “Real Estate & Homes” supplement to the Vineyard Gazette. A local mortgage broker by the name of Polly K. Bassett is quoted as touting how.

Bassett, the “co-owner and a broker of Martha’s Vineyard Mortgage Company, L.L.C., said: “We have access to a wide range of programs such as USDA, which is a program where you can put no money down, 100 percent financing, and we also do a 97 percent financing with three percent down….There are a lot of programs out there for people buying their first home.”

I put in a call to the Martha’s Vineyard Mortgage Company, where the phone was answered by Carol Borselle, Bassett’s business partner.

Borselle told me that the USDA mentioned in the article is, in fact, the Department of Agriculture. It turns out that the entire island is designated as a rural area eligible for a USDA loan.

According to Zillow, the cheapest home in Martha’s Vineyard is a two-bedroom condo listed at $260,000.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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2 thoughts on “American Insanity: How to Buy a Home in Martha’s Vineyard with Zero Money Down”

  1. Welfare for the Wealthy

    The current versions of the Farm Bill in the Senate (as usual, not as horrible as the House) and the House (as usual, terrifying) could hardly be more frustrating. The House is proposing $20 billion in cuts to SNAP — equivalent, says Beckmann, to “almost half of all the charitable food assistance that food banks and food charities provide to people in need.” [2]

    Deficit reduction is the sacred excuse for such cruelty, but the first could be achieved without the second. Two of the most expensive programs are food stamps, the cost of which has justifiably soared since the beginning of the Great Recession [3] , and direct subsidy payments.

    This pits the ability of poor people to eat — not well, but sort of enough — against the production of agricultural commodities.

    Even if this quote were not taken out of context — whoever wrote 2 Thessalonians was chastising not the poor but those who’d stopped working in anticipation of the second coming — Fincher ignores the fact that Congress is a secular body that supposedly doesn’t base policy on an ancient religious text that contradicts itself more often than not. Not that one needs to break a sweat countering his “argument,” but 45 percent of food stamp recipients are children, and in 2010, the U.S.D.A. reported that as many as 41 percent are working poor.

    This would be just another amusing/depressing example of an elected official ignoring a huge part of his constituency (about one in seven Americans rely on food stamps, though it’s one in five in Tennessee, the second highest rate in the South), were not Fincher himself a hypocrite.

    For the God-fearing Fincher is one of the largest recipients of U.S.D.A. farm subsidies in Tennessee history; he raked in $3.48 million in taxpayer cash from 1999 to 2012, $70,574 last year alone. The average SNAP recipient in Tennessee gets $132.20 in food aid a month; Fincher received $193 a day. (You can eat pretty well on that.) [4]

    Fincher is not alone in disgrace, even among his Congressional colleagues, but he makes a lovely poster boy for a policy that steals taxpayer money from the poor and so-called middle class to pay the rich, while propping up a form of agriculture that’s unsustainable and poisonous.

    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/welfare-for-the-wealthy/?

    Cut food stamps for indigent, subsidize foie gras for aristocrats…can’t make this stuff up….

    Reply
  2. Even our Congress is not that stupid. They know damned good and well that they’re buying complacency. If they do, indeed, cut SNAP significantly, that will be a clear indicator that they’re getting ready to pull the plug on this farce.

    Reply

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