Homeowners Of America, Incorporate!

Joe King, who is the author of the piece below, also goes by the online moniker Great Midwest at the progressive political website DailyKos, where we are both active members of its online community. Mr. King has given me permission to publish his comments in their entirety here.

Enjoy!

Homeowners of America, Incorporate!

I need a lawyer, stat! Not just any lawyer,but some hotshot who can draw up incorporation papers pronto. I think we can make this homeowner protection idea palatable to conservatives, but first we need to get all of America's troubled homeowners to incorporate into one $1.8 trillion corporation.

We all know how offended conservatives are at the notion of helping average Americans avoid foreclosure, but they can't wait to throw money at big corporations. So the solution is obvious -- Homeowners of America, Incorporate! We will call ourselves Homeowners in Crisis, or HIC.

And what a corporation HIC would be, take a look at the numbers.

The president estimates his program could help 9 million homeowners, so let's start there.

A bit of Googling reveals that the average home price in America is, to use a nice round number, about $200,000. Multiply that by 9 million and you discover that HIC would have assets worth about $1.8 TRILLION. Not bad.

Of course, that is only part of the story, because that figure takes into account only factories...I mean homes. It doesn't even begin to include the equipment (refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, etc) that it would take to keep all those HIC facilities scattered across the nation humming. That spending would add up billions a month, I suspect. Talk about you economic engine! Why HIC would be the largest buyer of consumer products in the nation!

Then there are the employees, I mean residents, of those homes. According to 2000 census data, the average household in America is 3.1 people -- but that includes a lot of apartment dwellers who are not as prolific at producing product (I mean kids)as HIC employees. So, let's round that up a bit to 3.5 per factory (which is probably a bit conservative) and you get 31.5 million employees, which would make HIC the largest employer in America.

Furthermore, unlike most other corporations, HIC pays taxes. Lots and lots of taxes. In fact, HIC would pay more taxes than any other corporation in America. I'm no economist, but I would be willing to wager that HIC probably would pay more taxes than all of the other corporations in America combined. Billions and billions a year to local, state and federal coffers.

Taken as a whole, it's a pretty impressive package (and this just scratches the surface.

HIC would be so huge that I'm sure conservatives would rush to its rescue! They would much rather fall all over themselves to save a single such corporation of this magnitude than pay any attention to 9 million "deadbeat homeowners who should have known better and deserve whatever they get."

So get me a lawyer ASAP. It's time to draw up some papers.

P.S. Because this is my idea I get to be CEO and take home a HUGE tax payer funded bonus, regardless of how well HIC performs. Be nice to me and I will get you one too.