WASHINGTON - Democrat Barack Obama derided Republican opponent John McCain's mortgage buyout plan on Thursday as a misdirected effort that rewards bad behavior by lenders and takes billions of dollars from taxpayers, already suffering a heavy burden as the country's financial system teeters on the brink of a meltdown.
Speaking at the start of a two-day bus tour through swing-state Ohio, Obama charged that McCain's plan would force the government to absorb the full cost of renegotiating mortgages to prevent borrowers from losing their homes. He said lenders should share some of the costs of any program that attempts to stem the American financial crisis that grew out of questionable home-mortgage practices.
McCain put forward the mortgage rescue idea Tuesday night during the second presidential debate in a bid to recapture momentum in the historic 2008 campaign, where polls show him slipping in the polls both nationally and state-by-state. He said the government should spend $300 billion to buy up bad mortgages and re-negotiate them at lower interest rates to prevent foreclosures and keep threatened Americans in their homes.
Obama told thousands at a Dayton baseball stadium that McCain's plan "would guarantee that American taxpayers lose by handing over $300 billion to underwrite the kind of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street that got us into this mess.".....
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