TIME Magazine’s Insensitive Back Page Essay On the Foreclosure Crisis

In "I Bought An Expensive House. My Bad. Not Yours," Joel Stein compares the current foreclosure crisis to Jim Carrey's career in a flip, insensitive and uneducated opinion piece. Here's a taste of Joel Stein's off-the-cuff, but copy-edited remarks: "A lot of optimistic people bought houses near the historic height of the market, say November 2005, for absurdly high prices, say $1.12 million, in places like the eastern Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. These people are very, very sad." Talk about irresponsible journalism. Now let's contrast that with a recent Chicago Tribune article on emerging ghost towns: "The children who live on West Wilcox Street won’t go out at night for fear of 12 vacant graystones that draw criminals to their block. In Rogers Park, a half-empty 39-unit condo building on Farwell Avenue has become a hide-out for squatters and feral cats." Joel Stein is talking about his friends - or wannabe celebrities while the Chicago Tribune deigns to report on the little people. The title of Stein's essay belies his self-involved analysis: “I Bought a Bad House. It's overpriced, and I'm an idiot. That doesn't mean the government should help me.”

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Meet a Beggar

I recently visited Chicago with my nine-year old daughter.  We stayed at an old hotel near the city center, just south of the Chicago River.  Though it was a high rent district, one of our neighbors worked as a beggar. When the beggar first approached us on that wide sidewalk…

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