Can You Explain HB87 … to your Children? Can its Supporters?

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Can You Explain HB87 … to your Children? Can its Supporters?
Mar 10, 2013 | Mark Stopa

I was chatting with a colleague on the phone the other day as I was driving my kids (ages, 9, 8, and 7) to school.  We were chatting about HB87, a proposed piece of legislation in Florida that would accelerate the foreclosure process and eradicate the rights of homeowners.

When I hung up, I found myself trying to explain the situation to my kids.  It wasn’t easy, but I could do it … from a defense perspective, anyway.

When people buy a house, they usually borrow money from a bank.  If they can’t pay the bank back (because they lost their job, for example), the bank will try to foreclose and take their house back.  Daddy helps those people try to keep their house in court.  But some of the bankers are trying to pass a law that would make it easier to take people’s homes away.  Daddy is trying to stop that.

As our conversation ended, I wondered how the bankers, legislators and others who support HB87 would try to explain it to their kids.  Can they?  How, exactly, would that conversation go?

When people buy a house, they usually borrow money from a bank.  If they can’t pay the bank back (because they lost their job, for example), the bank will try and foreclose and take the house back.  Daddy helps those banks try to foreclose faster and take the homes sooner.  And daddy is trying to help pass a law, called HB87, to make it easier to take people’s homes away.

Look, I get that I’m biased here. But I really wonder how anyone on the banks’ side of this would try to explain this to their children.  My point?

If you can’t explain what you’re doing to a child, what you’re doing probably isn’t right.