We recently wrote a post describing a MERS defeat in Oregon Bankruptcy Court, and MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Services, Inc., an electronic registry) is in the news once again. This has not only been a hot topic in Oregon, but people around the nation have been attacking MERS as
The 2005 bankruptcy “reform” law was really about abuse of consumers and protection of banks. Its lofty name “The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005” was no vehicle for consumer protection. I have long felt that this effort to make consumers more “responsible” financially has contributed to the dramatic economic downturn we have
Buried within most of the variants of President Obama’s proposal for extending health care to 47 million uninsured Americans is the notion that tax credits will somehow provide the financing. Tax credits have become popular with politicians in recent years because they look, superficially, revenue neutral. They are not. A tax credit is money the Treasury
Until passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), private student loans were treated as ordinary unsecured consumer debt. That badly misnamed piece of legislation made private education loans nondischargeable in bankruptcy except in cases of undue hardship. Several measures to relieve private student loan debtors have been introduced in Congress
Bankruptcy in many ways is a Christian concept. American bankruptcy laws have Biblical roots. The seven-year waiting period between personal bankruptcies that was the law until 2005, for example, is based upon Deuteronomy 15:1-2 At the end of every seven-year period you shall have a relaxation of debts, which shall be observed as follows. Every creditor
As explained in Dana Wilkinson’s article arguing in favor of a federal exemption for the Earned Income Credit, the federal credit, created by 26 U.S.C. §32 (1994), is a refundable tax credit provided for low income workers who have dependent children and who maintain a household. A low income taxpayer can get the credit, in the form of