January 29th, 2009 by Reed Allmand 
The House Judiciary Committee has approved a bankruptcy reform bill that will allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for people facing foreclosure.
The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. spoke of the importance of the bankruptcy reform:
"We have block after block of “for sale” and foreclosure signs – feeding off each other, driving down home values, uprooting families, decimating communities – and causing local tax revenue that pays for police and firefighters to plummet."
Exactly! Foreclosures destroy families, neighborhoods, communities and by extension the entire country. We cannot hold together our country if we allow foreclosures to go unfettered. This is exactly what many people are missing about the danger of massive foreclosures.
"We don’t have the luxury of worrying about theoretical future moral lessons, we need to stop the actual bleeding today…If we can spend 700 billion dollars to bail out the brokers on Wall Street, it seems the very least we can do is allow working families, willing to repay their debts as best they can, under court supervision, the dignity of being able to stay in their home."
Once again, Conyers has pinpointed the issue in its purest form when he highlights people’s concerns with "moral lessons." So many people erroneously believe that by helping homeowners avoid foreclosure that we are "enforcing bad behavior" by rewarding them for making "bad financial decisions." This is so far from being true and is the exact type of thinking that causes families and individuals to lose all their assets before they will consider bankruptcy. But when the financial powerbrokers are hurting we are ready to bail them out, no questions ask–literally. Bankruptcy is designed to help the very people who have made bad financial decisions. Everyone makes bad decisions sometimes and other times it is just circumstances that conspire to put them in financial ruin. But regardless of a person’s reason for facing foreclosure or needing to file bankruptcy, they should not have to suffer under the burden of unmanageable debt their entire lives–that’s why bankruptcy provides debt relief and is a perfect tool to stem the tide of foreclosures.
About Reed Allmand
Allmand's vision is rooted in his own financially precarious childhood in Abilene "My father always had difficulty holding a job and supporting our family, so after my parents divorced when I was 12, my sister and I got jobs to help make ends meet," he recalls. "I remember what it felt like as a child to worry that our car would be repossessed or home foreclosed on."
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