The credit crisis has exposed and worsened a dangerous and deepening divide in this country between a vast number of average borrowers and a fairly elite slice of corporations, banks and executives enriched by the mortgage mania.

Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them. But banks and the executives who ran them are quickly deemed worthy of taxpayer bailouts.

On the ground, this translates into millions of troubled borrowers, left to work through their problems with understaffed, sometimes adversarial loan servicing companies. If they get nowhere, they lose their homes.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, are asked to stand by with money to inject into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants, should they need propping up if loan losses balloon.

The message in this disconnect couldn’t be clearer. Borrowers should shoulder the consequences of signing loan documents they didn’t understand, but with punishing terms that quickly made the loans unaffordable. But for executives and directors of the big companies who financed these loans, who grew wealthy while the getting was good, the taxpayer is coming to the rescue.

Each day a borrower in distress has been left to swing in a noose of strangling debt by Congress and the Bush Administration, the more unlikely it is that they will ever slip that noose, or at least be left with options that can help them reduce their losses. The most arguably effective foreclosure prevention policy options – such as proposals to declare foreclosure moratoriums and to grant bankruptcy judges the ability to demand loan modifications from mortgage lenders – have been rejected as too extreme.

But at this point, now that we are years into this crisis, even if we were to miraculously overnight create a vast army of foreclosure prevention counselors and lawyers, it would be too little, too late, to avert the on-coming foreclosure tidal wave.

Meanwhile the voting public, conservatives and liberals alike, even those who have responded to my past blogs on the subject, are convinced that the people who received their subprime loans, deserve all that they will get – which for me, as a former banker is an absurd and misguided notion. I have yet to meet a borrower, no matter how supposedly stupid or greedy that borrower happens to be, who has underwritten his or her own loan.

On second thought, maybe we're on to something. My father always tells me that, as voters, we get the government we deserve. So by extension, as home sales continue to plummet and we are dragged under water by our collective debt and financial wreckage, we as a nation will undoubtedly get the economy we deserve as well.