Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 47. Sunrise is 6:49 and sunset is 4:29 for 9 hours 40 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4 PM, the Police and Fire Commission at 6 PM, and the Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1558, Queen Mary I of England dies and is succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth I.
About those fifty-year mortgages that the federal administration proposed:
Trump got his fifty-year-mortgage idea from the MAGA loyalist Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who reportedly pitched it as a way to offer home buyers lower monthly payments. But Pulte seems to have neglected to tell the President a couple of pertinent facts. Since mortgage holders pay off most of the interest on a loan before they start eating into the principal in a meaningful way, it could take someone who took out a fifty-year mortgage decades to build up much equity. And, because of the longer duration of the loan, they would carry higher interest rates than shorter-term loans. Analysts at UBS Securities calculated that, under Trump’s scheme, a typical borrower with a mortgage of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars would save a hundred and nineteen dollars a month, but they would make payments for an extra twenty years and end up paying twice as much interest.
After widespread blowback to the idea, Trump’s enthusiasm for it appeared to wane, and Politico reported that White House officials were furious with Pulte for selling the President “a bill of goods.” Pulte, too, seemed to pull back. He said the Administration was considering another option, “portable mortgages” that would allow homeowners to transfer their loan for one property to another. The idea here would be to break the current logjam in which many people are reluctant to move because they’d have to take out a new mortgage at a higher rate. But Pulte provided no details about how the loan transfers would work, or whether banks would even agree to them.
See John Cassidy, Donald Trump Can’t Dodge the Costly K-Shaped Economy, The New Yorker, November 17, 2025.
The federal mortgage plan (so predatory it’s probably dead forever) gives homeowners something, but in return it takes more. It’s simply a new version of an old deception: “The Closer You Look, The Less You See.”
Schemes are a paltry a substitute for supply, as schemers aren’t worthy suppliers.
Sheep pass through Nuremberg to winter pastures in Germany: