To stimulate, or not to stimulate: that’s the question that American politicians, many of whom will be fighting for their professional lives in the upcoming midterm elections, are debating right now. But on Friday, the New York Times’s David Streitfield posed a different question, one that tends to get lost amid the end-of-days hyperbole that accompanies the arguments of those on both sides of the stimulus question: who’s going to pay for it all.

In the United States, the federal government has just finished pumping $30 billion dollars into the housing market in the form of a tax credit that paid first-time buyers as much as $8,000 and those who were moving up to $6,500. But it’s done next to nothing to stop – or even slow – the meltdown in the American housing market. As Streitfield writes, “If last year’s tax credit was supposed to be a bridge over a rough patch, it ended with a glimpse of the abyss. The average home now takes more than a year to sell. Add in the homes that are foreclosed but not yet for sale and the total is greater still.”

Predictably, housing industry spokespeople are campaigning for a new round of even larger tax credits. But there is a growing chorus of people arguing that propping up housing prices in order to support the financial health of today’s generation of home owners does a tremendous disservice to the next one. Streitfield quotes Anthony B. Sanders, a professor of real estate finance at George Mason University, who argues that “Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels. If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.” Letting prices fall, Streitfield writes, would finally attract the buyers that the government has been trying to bait, “creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.”

It’s unlikely, Streitfield hints, given the political clout of today’s homeowners and the increasingly dire situation in which they find themselves, that the government will let prices fall. But they may not be able to do anything about it, either. Streitfield quotes David Crowe, the chief economist for the National Association of Home Buillders, who believes that “if we can’t get a very large tax credit — one that really brings people off the bench — why use our political capital at all?” In the end, Streitfield writes, “that might give the Obama administration permission to take the risk of doing nothing.”