OK, so you get an $8,000 tax credit. Fantastic. Sounds like a great deal, right? As someone who has been perpetually looking for a house, I can tell you that it’s a bad decision to buy a house right now, not just for that reason, but for any reason.

First, we’re re-inflating the housing bubble. Interest rates are below 5 percent. The FHA will give you a loan with only 3.5 percent down. Both of these incentives increase the amount of demand for houses (particularly from people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford a house—sound familiar?), pressuring the prices upward. While inventory increased slightly over the summer, it wasn’t what it should have been because the banks are holding onto all the foreclosures to artificially sustain the prices.

Second, because we’re printing so much money because of the government’s gigantic debt, the purchasing power of the dollar will suffer. Interest rates will have to rise to keep inflation under control. And when interest rates rise, people can’t afford to borrow as much money, and so housing prices will drop.

But we get $8,000 if we act now! This brings me to my third point. Thanks to artificial incentives like the housing credit, prices are increasing. I’m willing to bet they’ve increased more than $8,000. So go ahead, get your $8,000 tax credit…and pay $20,000 more for your house. Which of course you’ll have to borrow, so it will really be around $40,000 extra by the time you pay it off.

The only reason It makes sense to buy now is if you see we are headed into a hyper-inflationary environment. That scenario benefits those in debt because it’s easier to pay off large sums of cash when the dollar is worthless.  Borrowing $400,000 from someone stupid enough to lend it to you at 4.8 percent with virtually nothing down during hyperinflation would make sense because you could conceivably pay off your mortgage by selling a few loaves of bread.