Ever since Congress finally moved to provide financial assistance to homeowners struggling to pay their monthly mortgages, I’ve heard nothing but whining, mostly from folks who aren’t having any troubles making their own housing payments.

“Why should I have to pay to help someone who was too irresponsible to actually buy a house they could afford?” That’s the complaint I hear all the time.

There are some problems with that statement. First of all, many of the people facing foreclosure aren’t in their perilous financial situation because they were greedy. Some were misled into terrible adjustable-rate mortgages by greedy loan officers. Others lost their jobs. Some got injured. Some divorced. There are a host of reasons why your financial situation can suddenly take a turn for the worse.

Secondly, how much money do you think you personally are going to be shelling out for the housing assistance act? Come on, it’s not like the government is taking thousands of dollars away from you for this one particular bill.

But the best reason to stop whining about the bailout? It just might save our economy.

Quoted in a BusinessWeek story written by Chris Farrell Zvi Bodie, a financial professor at Boston University, says that while it might not be fair for fiscally responsible homeowners to help pay for the bailout of those facing foreclosures, it’d be even worse to let the country’s housing situation degenerate further. You can read her comments, and Farrell’s intriguing story, here.

Bodie’s main point: Is it wise to put the economy into a deep recession or depression? The answer, of course, is “no.”

So next time you feel like complaining about the housing assistance bailout, remember, for the government to not have done anything would have been the worst decision of all.

Pres. Bush signed the housing stimulus billinto law yesterday. Let’s hope it provides some hope the millions of U.S. homeowners facing foreclosure.

The bill — known as the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 — is designed t0 let about 400,000 homeowners refinance into affordable government-backed loans. It also offers a temporary tax credit for first-time buyers. The credit will provide $7,500 toward the purchase of a home, and can be used for purchases made from April 9 of this year through July 1 of next.

The bill also includes government assistance for giant mortgage providers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of whom are facing their own serious financial difficulties.

This bill isn’t perfect, and it won’t nearly help all those homeowners currently struggling to make their mortgage payments. And from what I gather from listening to radio news shows and reading letters to the editor in local newspapers, there are a lot of people out there who resent any kind of government assistance to homeowners who are struggling to make their monthly mortgage payments.

To me, though, this bill, with its imperfections, is still a necessity. Yes, many people facing foreclosure are doing so because they were greedy. They took out adjustable rate mortgages with artificially low initial mortgage payments so that they could get into a home they otherwise would not have been able to afford. But there are just as many, if not more, homeowners facing foreclosure because they’ve lost their jobs in this difficult economy, have become ill or were pressured into a bad mortgage loan by shady loan officers.

We should be helping that last group of people, right?

The end of the month has been a bad time for anyone following the residential real estate market: This is when associations like the National Association of Realtors release their monthly housing sales statistics. It’s also when the data regarding housing foreclosures come out.

For a long time now, both these statistics have been depressing. And that didn’t change in June.

I’ve already written about yet another decline in sales statistics. Today, I have bad news regarding the number of housing foreclosures: They were up again in June. Significantly.

According to RealtyTrac, a national provider of foreclosed properties, one in every 171 households received a foreclosure notice in the second quarter of this year. That’s an increase of 121 percent compared to the same quarter one year earlier.

This is further evidence that the housing assistance legislation that Congress passed earlier this month is sorely needed.

What about you? Are you facing foreclosure? Know someone who is? What happened that led to this?

There’s an interesting debate going on now between members of Congress and the Federal Housing Administration. Congress has proposed legislation requiring the FHA to back up to $300 billion worth of risky mortgage loans. The commissioner of the FHA, Brian Montgomery, opposes this legislation, saying that taking on so many bad loans would hurt his agency.

Montgomery, speaking before the National Press Club, said that the FHA is not designed to handle high-risk mortgage loans. Instead, it is set up to work with safter, less risky loans.

I have to agree with Montgomery here. Forcing the FHA to take on so many bad loans is yet another too-little, too-late attempt by Congress to deal with the nation’s housing mess. If Congress really wanted to stop the bad loans, high number of foreclosures and falling real estate prices, they would have taken action earlier to stop mortgage lenders from relaxing their loan requirements so much. During the height of the housing boom, mortgage lenders were giving out mortgage loans every day to borrowers who clearly did not have the financial wherewithal to own a home.

Leaning on the FHA, an agency designed to help stabilize the economy, is not the way to tackle the housing crisis.

It’s a pretty stunning move: Officials with the National Association of Home Builders on Feb. 12 decided that the group’s political action committee will no longer make contributions to candidates for U.S. Congress.

The reason? Association officials say that Congress hasn’t done enough in the last six months to stabilize the struggling housing market. You can read a statement from the home builders association here.

I have to admit, when I read this I was surprised. Organizations like the National Association of Home Builders have active political action committees, ones that spread tons of money around to politicians.

Then I began thinking: What if all special-interest groups like the National Association of Home Builders stopped making donations to legislators? How would that change our political system?

Maybe I’m naive, but I think I’d like a world without lobbyists and political action committees.