These days, some drivers are sporting bumper stickers that say: "Honk if you're paying my mortgage." CNBC on-air reporter Rick Santelli sparked a firestorm by calling people struggling to keep up with their mortgages "losers."

As federal policymakers have moved to provide assistance to borrowers who are in danger of losing their homes, these affronts--and other blame-the-borrower rhetoric--are on the rise. Some commentators are publicizing the fiction that it was greedy borrowers who brought down our economy by buying homes they couldn't afford.

Borrowers living on the financial edge were targets of an out-of-control mortgage machine created by big lenders and Wall Street. It was a system designed to value overheated growth and quick bucks over sustainable and sensible lending.

Lenders used three unseemly tactics to fuel their headlong growth; the first was bait-and-switch salesmanship. Government investigators found a pattern of fraud at many of the nation's largest mortgage lenders, including Ameriquest, Household and Countrywide. Fast-talking loan salespeople knew the ins and outs of the increasingly complex loan products they were selling; borrowers were no match. California's attorney general, for example, has charged that Countrywide "misrepresented or obfuscated the true terms" of its "hybrid" adjustable-rate mortgages, lying about whether or not the loans would adjust upward or about how long the initial fixed rate lasted.

Lenders also pressured real-estate appraisers to overstate home values in order to make these deals appear legitimate. Borrowers had no control over this; lenders picked the appraisers and provided the financial inducements to conjure bogus home values. For years, an ongoing petition signed by thousands of appraisers charged that lenders frequently "black-balled" honest appraisers and instead used "rubber stamp" appraisers who gave them the values they wanted.

Lastly, there is the issue of inflated borrower incomes. As the real-estate bubble grew, and mortgages got bigger and bigger, lenders used puffed-up financial data to qualify borrowers for loans that, in truth, they couldn't really afford. Some borrowers were aware they were exaggerating their income and savings. But they almost invariably did so under the instructions of mortgage professionals who told them what numbers they needed to claim to get their money--and reassured them that it was perfectly OK because this was the way things were done.

Many borrowers, though, had no idea their financial profiles had been manipulated. They did what most people thought was standard procedure, turning in pay stubs and tax documents to their lenders. But workers inside the lending machine brushed aside this documentation and instead created falsified paperwork designed to speed the loans through the approval process and encourage investors to buy them on the burgeoning "mortgage-backed" securities market.

Meanwhile, the federal government has, by one estimate, committed more than $12 trillion to try and prop up failing banks and other firms that helped create the crisis. The Obama administration's housing plan proposes to spend a fraction of that--$75 billion--on direct aid to keep struggling borrowers in their homes.

As policymakers and citizens consider how this money is being spent, we should worry less about blaming victims and more about the social and economic benefits of keeping families in their homes. If millions more foreclosures are allowed to go through, the self-sustaining spiral of plummeting home values and recessionary pain will continue, and all of us will suffer.

Michael Hudson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is a researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonpartisan policy organization based in Durham, N.C. He is currently working on a book about the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market.