Education is key here, and we had millions of utterly uneducated people financed into things they couldn't afford. You bail out those people, and they will never learn. Let them foreclose, try to find a rental, not be able to use credit for a few years, and those people will never make that mistake again.

We have one of the worst savings rates (actually negative) of all modern civilized countries, and we have systems in place to keep our society totallly ignorant to their mistakes. Whenever our citizens make a bad choice, they are automatically victims and demand assistance, and they are showed "empathy" rather than allowing them to grow from their ignorant state. There are so few people that actually take personal responsibility for any of their actions in this country that it makes me sick.