Jon Coupal of the Sacramento, CA Capitol Weekly, rises in defense of the typical homeowner. The deduction for home mortgage interest is "unquestionably essential for vast numbers of California homeowners who seek to keep their homes."

This problem doesn't stop at the California state lines, but we'll stick to my state of residence because I have numbers to back my own experience as a homeowner. I could never have bought my home without the mortgage interest deduction, and currently only 25 percent of California families can afford an entry-level home. In fact, if I had to buy now, Ken Seamann - an enrolled agent licensed to practice by the Internal Revenue Service and a mortgage loan consultant licensed by the California Department of Real Estate - tells me that deduction wouldn't be as much help to me now as it was 20 years ago when I bought my house! I maybe wouldn't have qualified for the house in which I now reside, and I make more than 80% of the American workers according to George Bush's Census Department.

The current mortgage crisis wasn't created by those who applied for housing loans. Those who benefited from the lax rules and worse enforcement are among those 6% of Americans who make over $100k a year. We're aren't talking about the California equivalents of Citigroup's IT workforce facing layoff to trim costs incurred through bad executive board decisions. We're not talking about the California Harley riders, nor the AT&T text messagers using Motorola cell phones, nor the AMD-powered Dell laptop users checking their Yahoo email, nor their grandparents who have to hock their homes to pay for Eli Lilly products so as to have some kind of quality of life, nor any of the customers of so many other companies seeking to separate employees considered as disposable in our top-down culture war.

But when Citigroup can announce that their losses weren't as bad as their investors feared, I guess that's all that really matters to those residing in camouflaged Airstreamers festooned with Rusty Bob (wire, that is). Everyone else can just die and decrease the surplus impoverished population.