Rick Santelli's CNBC populist outrage whining rant on the so-called "deadbeats with the extra bathroom" has garnered a lot of attention. But few people have really looked at the numbers behind how we got into this mess and who really is affected by it.

While it may be good television to pander to the traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade or the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, or your buddies on morning televsion on CNBC, MSNBC and all the other cable outlets, the reality is no one on television or elsewhere in the media has approached this problem from an objective viewpoint and with the appropriate statistics to explain the problem.

Let's call it the "Enronization" of America. For if you look closely, you will see a pattern emerging -- not just of boom/bust cycles, but of a methodology of creating expensive but worthless "products" designed to extract as much money as quickly as possible from the hapless saps uninformed consumers who bought it, hook, line and sinker.

While one can make a reasoned case that you don't "need" technology and fancy websites with flaming logos (the dotcom boom/bust) or fancy energy and oil derivatives (Enron boom/bust), housing -- and this is about housing, not just home sales -- is a very different matter. Everyone needs shelter.

Everyone needs shelter and there are only two ways to get it: you either rent or you buy. And the damage done to housing by this boom/bust affects everyone.

California is a bellwether of what is in store for the rest of the country. The independent group, the California Budget Project (www.cbp.org) has taken a comprehensive look at California's budget problems since 1994. Starting 2000, the CBP has published "Locked Out" a series of detailed reports on the status of California housing crisis. The 2008 report is startling. In studying the numbers, you see the problem in a whole different light. This is a housing crisis, not a foreclosure or subprime loan crisis. 

The harsh reality is that the financial community is to blame for not putting a halt to the sale of over-priced homes by just not writing mortgages on them. Not because there was something wrong with prospective homebuyers, but the home sale was flawed. How do you justify inflating the cost of a home by more than 200% in 5 or 7 years? How do you knowingly write a loan for that house? They did it because they could sell confusing mortgage products to customers in need of housing. And it would make the lenders loads of easy money.   

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