CLARKONOMICS: The Senate has reached a bipartisan deal for a mortgage bailout of those facing foreclosure. The vote was 94-to-1, with Jim Bunning (R-KY) being the only person to vote no. We're being told this new measure will help ailing homeowners, but it's really another bailout of the banks. We are the ones who will be paying through tax dollars to subsidize lenders that wrote bad loans.

The mortgage industry asked to be allowed to correct itself, and Bush was very happy to launch the Hope Now initiative with that in mind. The Commander-in-Chief was told that calls to this helpline were being answered in about 30 seconds, but a New York Times reporter experienced wait time of an hour before giving up. The kind of help Hope Now is promising should instead be coming from the private sector, Clark believes.

The penny-pinching guru applauds a Maryland plan to require that homebuyers go through independent counseling before taking on a high-risk loan. Such a plan would reduce the number of people getting into trouble with sub-prime loans. As often happens in capitalism, the pendulum swung too far toward idiotic lending. Buyers and lenders were both at fault. Clark just worries that the 85-90% of us who do pay our mortgages every month will have to subsidize everybody else. He can't support that.

It's important to realize things correct themselves with time. USA Today recently reported on entire neighborhoods in Denver going dark because of foreclosures. In the short term, that's a disaster. But look back to Houston in the late '80s. Several neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosures became ghost towns. Eventually Houston recovered and those neighborhoods are now alive and well. The same will happen in Denver. Time heals excess.

Here's a caveat, though: In the Midwest, Ohio and Michigan, the foreclosure problem is compounded by labor market problems. These neighborhoods may not come back because of lack of future job growth. One Ohio community is even bulldozing boarded-up houses and building parks.