The only way to make America affordable again is mass deportations. That will protect American workers' wages while lowering the cost of housing, education, and healthcare. MAGA Econ/Polisci 101: increase supply, decrease demand, reward allies, punish adversaries: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
Ending government entitlements to illegals is like making me buy pseudoephedrine directly from the pharmacist because you can make meth with it. The meth is not being cooked from retail boxes at the CVS. Meth is being made by components purchased through shill pharmacies. Illegals are not entitled to government aid, and yet, here we are. If you want to put a stop to this, put a stop the NGOs that are running the fraud.
Use 8 USC 1324 to arrest the ceo's of the biggest employers of the invaders. If the ceo of Tyson was perp walked, facing hundreds of ten year felonies, nobody would ever hire an illegal again. Problem solved. Arrest everyone who even said good morning to the guy who murdered Lakken Riley and the game would be over.
There's no logical argument for stopping illegal immigration if you believe in racial equality. The latter is incompatible with the former. Most people are terrified little cowards about being called 'racist'. They have no effective logical arguments against that accusation. It's weak to say that immigration laws must be enforced, because the left will always make you feel guilty and immoral by insisting that such laws are racist to begin with.
Since everyone in the US has been brainwashed to believe in racial equality, therefore illegal immigration will continue forever (duh). Beliefs have consequences, and rotten beliefs result in rotten consequences. Here's the bottom line: until and unless the masses of people in the US embrace race realism, they will always be unwitting pawns of the left, endowing leftists with the moral authority to continue their agenda of taking over every aspect of society. The longer conservatives avoid this issue, the longer the left will stay in control, to the endless confusion of conservatives. No wonder conservatives have conserved nothing over the last 70 years, not even women's bathrooms.
I absolutely believe in racial equality, and racial equality has nothing to do with illegal entry to this or any country. New citizens of any nationality (or religion) should be background-checked and carefully vetted as to their suitability for American citizenship. America first, yes?
Oh, oh, prepare yourself for another “screed” !!!! Because I'm a patient, logical man, I'll try to get through to you one more time.
Unbeknownst to yourself, your mind is filled with cognitive dissonance. You want to accept only one facet of racial equality, and conveniently ignore the rest of its assumptions that would negate whatever you seem to be supporting regarding immigration. (BTW, since you've never completely explained what all those beliefs are, you are deliberately keeping everyone who's trying to discuss this issue in the dark, which is to your benefit. You can change your arguments on the fly, and nobody can call you on it for inconsistency. It's a quintessential postmodernist tactic, beloved of leftists.)
If you believe in racial equality, then there is no logical reason to vet anyone who desires to immigrate. They are all equally qualified. But if for some reason their skill sets differ, then the blank slate assumption of racial equality means that their life in a new environment will increase their expertise in whatever may be lacking at the point they immigrated. Thus such inevitable improvement means they should not be prevented from immigration in the first place. You are preventing a culturally-handicapped immigrant from overcoming the obstacles of their poor environment in their original country.
If you believe in racial equality, there is no reason to even have immigration laws, because not only are all immigrants economically beneficial to their new country, there is more importantly no MORAL reason to keep them out. If you keep them out, that is an immoral judgment about their innate character. You are being judgmental, and any immigration laws are immoral to begin with. You have no factual reason to judge immigrants as being unable to benefit the social cohesion and moral fiber of the community. Again note that whatever skill set they may or may not have is unrelated to, and has no impact on, this issue.
As to what I say, or how I say it being a “screed”, that is typical reversion to yet another mindless leftist slur. That's essentially all you people have, no logical discourse, instead just kneejerk spewing of slurs such as “fascist”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “screed”, and on and on and on. Leftists foist off a lazy accusation about someone writing a “screed”, so that they don't have to do the hard work of actually responding intelligently point-by-point. It's the old trick of attacking the messenger, so that you can ignore the hard issues contained in the message.
It's long past time for leftist ninnies such as yourself to either re-examine your inconsistent set of beliefs, or else shut the hell up. But I don't expect you'll do either one, since the essence of leftism is not having the self-awareness to examine your own beliefs. I won't be responding again, so feel free to act like an infant and have the last word with a continuation of your fact-free assertions and ad hominems. Have a nice day, y'all, buh-bye!
According to your stated beliefs, that means your mind is drowning in cognitive dissonance. Why? To prove it, here's woke leftist logic:
If you believe in racial equality, then you believe that all people are born the same, a blank slate at birth shaped by factors within their environment. They all have the same, equal built-in talents and skills. But nonwhite people who want to immigrate to the US don't usually have a good education or material wealth. Such people didn't have the right things in their environment to help them get a good education, maintain good health, and acquire material wealth. They must have been treated unfairly by their society because they are not white. The US must have treated their societies unfairly because they are nonwhite societies. Restrictive US immigration laws are racially discriminatory, because they prevent these poor nonwhite people from improving their lives. It is racially discriminatory to enforce those laws, so if you support those laws you are a racist.
Cognitive dissonance: you are a racist who supports racially discriminatory immigration laws, but you also believe in racial equality.
Here's non-leftist logic: It doesn't matter what you call yourself, you are actually a leftist, because racial equality is THE primary leftist belief. Here's proof: leftists are mentally incapable of seeing inconsistencies in their thinking. Your leftist mindset means you have no self-awareness about what you are thinking or saying or doing. Which means you won't believe me when I say that you have cognitive dissonance. Just like every leftist, you will then respond to me with postmodernist nonsense, where whatever your personal selfish feelings about an issue happen to be, they supercede objective facts and consistent logic. Like all leftists, you will justify your muddy thinking by using even more muddy thinking. You start with an assumption (racial equality), but then you don't like the logical conclusions that result from that assumption. Instead of changing your assumption, you try to justify it by using illogical, muddy, specious reasoning.
Anyway, this is all very tiresome, because you obviously will never learn. I always hope people like you will wake up and be ashamed of your poor thinking and fake moral beliefs, but that never happens, so this is all just a waste of my time. Have a nice day and all that, buh-bye.
Ah yes, a "rant", a "screed". That's typical reversion to yet another mindless leftist slur. It's essentially all you people have, no logical discourse, instead just kneejerk spewing of slurs such as “fascist”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “screed”, and on and on and on. You people are absolutely unable to do any self-examination. You're convinced you don't have to, since you are morally superior and can ignore anything your designated enemy may have to say. Leftists foist off a lazy accusation about someone writing a “screed”, so that they don't have to do the hard work of actually responding intelligently point-by-point. It's the old trick of attacking the messenger, so that you can ignore the hard issues contained in the message. Anyway, keep up the great work, chuck-0 !!!
Ah, very good, exactly what I expected from a leftist ninnie. No logical argumentation that addresses the issues, just a few ad hominems, coated with the reek of sanctimonious, pseudo-intellectual arrogance. It's amusing to see that it triggered you, since the truth tends to do that with liars and fakes.
As for the rant, I took care to simplify it for the obviously dumb audience that prompted it in the first place. But even then, it's obviously far too nuanced for NPC's like you. Have fun with all that, chuck-0, ta-ta!
It’s a system alright, but healthcare doesn’t have anything to do with it. The senators holding the taxpayers’ feet to the fire to cover ACA “premiums” (great word) should have been talking to the insurers—figure out how to cut the premiums or your tax bills (corporate and personal) just doubled. I know, that’s as possible as a 50 yr mortgage. But they work by sound bytes.
Healthcare has EVERYTHING to do with it. That monster has grown to consume 1/5 of the economy. No amount of playing with insurance or premiums will do a damn thing to help. COSTS must come down. That is the only way to fix it.
I agree. It’s not just insurers. It’s the unholy alliance of hospitals, pharma and insurers that made this problem. Costs of care are inflated to cover “overhead” — not so much the MRI equipment say, as sales, marketing, admin staff to push the paperwork around, liability, and yes profits. How much does blue cross spend to blitz me with “open enrollment!” pitches? How many ads do you see, hear for ozempic? Even Trump wants to pitch it. “Only $50!” How many folks in the doc office, let alone the hospital, are there to process insurance info? “Do you have have insurance?” replaced “How are you today?” a long time ago. I’m no expert, but even I can see the flaws in this “system.” Health seems to be at the bottom of the list.
The only way is a word no one likes to fear. ration healthcare. Not everyone can have open heart surgery, chemotherapy ad infinitum, mri’s til the cows come home, scans for every little problem etc
Coming down hard on the AMA and the rest who are preventing the training of more physicians would help. (Not sure that is legal. How about establishing a parallel structure for training? Competition?)
But the problem will only get worse as long as people treat themselves like shit. The main reason care is cheaper in other parts of the West is they are healthier.
I have proposed the following several times. It never gets any attention. I think it would put the cork in the bottle:
50% of Americans get tax-free healthcare from their employer. even considering their deductibles this is a powerful incentive to use the system. And some of us got a way better deal. I retired from Ed. My insurance was excellent, and my deductible was tiny.
So...
Tax the healthcare benefits according to use. Every policy has an inherent value that can be defined. My former employer laid out about $10,000 a year for each of us. Yes, I know they got a good deal.
So let's say the policy is worth $10,000. Let's say I use $1500 in a year. That $1500 should be taxed as income.
Tax right up to face value. After face, no more tax. If I use $15,000, I am taxed on $10,000.
You might include a waiver for truly catastrophic illness.
Divert that money into making the "system" solvent.
That will "bend the curve." Bet on it.
Too many people are cavalier about using the system. Maybe they would think harder if it was taxed?
Well you found a "never get elected again" solution. Some people do have real catastrophic problems. I have had surgery for a life threatening, but noncancerous, growth. It was genetic (two cousins have had the same thing happen). Taxing me on top of that would be a f**king insult.
So you believe you are entitled to tax free income?
BTW if you get tax free income, shouldn't everyone get an equivalent benefit? Make EVERYTHING related to healthcare non-taxed? Even supplements? Some people use natural medicine. Where is their cut?
And I did say a catastrophic waiver...
We need to remember where this all comes from. FDR gave us national healthcare, but only for the privileged people... The ones that made the war go. It grew from there. The government treats this as a tax EXPENDITURE, because revenue is forgiven...
Obamacare should have been called Baucuscare. The legislation counterintuitively originated in the Senate finance committee. That is because the expenditure already was on the books.
Today 50% of the people have employer paid healthcare. Even if you pay into it your employer almost certainly pays a bigger share. 25% of everybody is on medicaid. About 19% are on medicare. Oh, and they penalize the shit out of you if you don't sign up promptly at retirement. You better not have to change your mind... They are nicking me for just under $200 a month. I get doctor visits and a couple of generic prescriptions.
So maybe 93 or 94% of everyone is already getting some government funding or other. The subsidies that shut down the government go to some medicaid recipients in "non-expanded medicaid" states and people who don't get medicaid who buy in the marketplaces. That last group is a portion of the people in that 6 or 7% who aren't otherwise covered. I don't think it is known how many people are uninsured.
It seems to me that small % is mighty costly. But do recall that projected "$1.5 trillion" is a ten year figure. These BIG numbers are always ten year.
The get the rich theory was originally that marketplace purchasers could afford it...
It doesn't matter. This is pulling us under. But I'm sure there will be people arguing this even as the deck slides under the waves beneath their feet.
The out of control health system will only be curtailed with a restructuring of delivery systems to smaller entities, focused on preventative care and everyday infectious process or minor accidents. It is only the current litigious climate that fuels massive referral to specialists. When the smallest mistake on the independent practitioner merits a state health board review, large multistate hospitals get a pass. Vertical monopolies, large multi state hospital chains have not only gutted quality of care but also resulted in massive escalation in charges.
Was hoping el gato would comment on inflationary impacts of tens of millions of illegals. Must be impacting food, rent, mortgage, health care and definitely car insurance.
Economics can be extremely complex (and inherently nebulous).
Somethings are simple:
a 30 year mortgage is better than one for 50 - a 20 year mortgage (I had one), is better than one for 30 yrs.
The most important thing is the ratio of average income to average home price - nobody talks about that.
The impact of BlackRock scarfing up SFD needs to be stopped and reversed; and the impact of massive immigration needs to be understood and reckoned with.
And then there’s the increasing disparities in income. A 50 yr mortgage is a lot like a student loan
Institutional investors should never have been allowed to buy SFD. Not sure they should be allowed to buy multi-family either. This is a massive policy failure.
There's a difference here between what's best for the individual vs what's best for society. A 30-yr mortgage is great for the individual (given the current low (and subsidized) interest rates, one can use the additional savings to invest and easily beat the interest rate). I'm not sure what the optimal loan duration is for society but thirty years for any purchase seems to be approaching rentier status.
Because Americans want those 75 year old shacks in the Barrio with 17 people crammed inside. Get real. Immigrants add more to housing in their labor than they take.
Was the illegal alien Superintendent of Des Moines IA living in a shack while making 350k per year. Is the illegal alien mayor of Coldwater KS living in a shack? We are infiltrated on every level, not just barrios. What houses did the illegal aliens buy with OUR FHA loans. You are talking out of your ass!!
No he's right. Most of the aliens are crammed into tiny spaces. That is in fact how this has always ran. Aliens, legal or otherwise, have mostly always started on the bottom.
Two differences now and then: Welfare, obviously.
The frontier. There has been talk of opening up Federal lands to more homesteading. Maybe?
Low wage immigrants might add to the pie, but the benefits are all tilted to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. There is only one way to increase living standards - increase per capita productivity. And there is only one way to continuously increase per capita productivity - investment in production technology. Bringing in low-skill, low-cost workers lowers per capita productivity, but it allows the wealthy to shift more money to themselves in the form of increased profits.
Lower skilled workers/immigrants can either hurt or help productivity, depending upon how they are used and whether they complement or replace more skilled workers, and how or whether those “increased profits” you mention are invested
Overall productivity is not as important as per capita productivity. You can increase overall productivity while lowering per capital productivity. The question I would pose is: If a business becomes more profitable by replacing higher paid workers with lower paid workers (regardless of skill level), do you really believe that business will reinvest profits into worker productivity? Or will they invest in expansion by undercutting the competition in a race to the bottom? Here's an example: When Trump started deportations during his first term, meatpacking plants could not find enough cheap immigrant labor to meet operational requirements, so they began 8nvesting heavily in automation. When Biden became president, they stopped the investment and started hiring illegal labor again. Business will almost always invest in the quickest easiest way to make money.
There is a huge illegal population, and they represent a demand on the housing market (and food, and transportation, and healthcare.) They may be the one single biggest reason for inflation in these areas.
And as you point out, they increase the supply of labor, which drives wages downward.
It's a double whammy to legitimate citizens: Higher prices, lower wages.
The distortion in the health care markets occasioned by illegal immigrants is the requirement that hospitals built with Hill Burton (federal funding) support any and all who present to the emergency room. With the free access to the system, comes all the legally mandated requirements for comprehensive health care. Look at the losses of most hospitals serving illegals, low income and uninsured - all of whom receive their basic medical care through the ER: They are cratering on bad, uncollectible debt. These hospitals are essentially funding health care for all (for many unreimbursable services) out of the pockets of those who can pay. Cue the rise of "specialty" hospitals, essentially funded by hedge fund financiers, who have no such requirements and do not maintain any form of ER or urgent care to avoid such populations.
The cement guy waiting for a job outside your local Home Depot is not competing with you for new single family housing. He is trying to help build that housing at lower prices via his lower wages. His house is the 75 year old shack with 5 people bunking in the garage located in the barrio. His wife is the person cooking at the local restaurant for half the $20 per hour required by Newsom for fast food wages.
Low skilled labor does not drive up the cost of living for higher skilled labor. It complements it. Yes, it will drive down wages for similarly low skilled native workers. But let me ask a question… who are these Americans who are unable to develop their skills in 18 years so that they have to compete with uneducated Guatemalans that can’t even speak English? If the best job you can get can be taken by a Spanish speaking watermelon picker, then you are either an idiot or a bum. People reading this blog are not bums or idiots, and their competition for jobs and homes is not coming from someone named Juan or Juanita.
Deporting Juan or Juanita may be a good or bad idea. But it is not going to fix your cost of living unless your state or local government is forcing you to fund their welfare or medical care.
First, I live in a 150 year old house. Don't presume that only destitute people live in old houses.
Governments are spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to take care of illegals. True enough, governments spend all kinds of money on all kinds of boondoggles. I'd go so far as to say our biggest problem isn't illegals, it's governments.
Now, a question: Do those illegals have driver's licenses? Auto insurance? Worker's comp? Health insurance? Liability insurance? Have they gone thru the same background check that all legitimate workers have to go thru before they can be hired, in order to MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT ILLEGAL?
Have you ever done that work? I did, for many years when I was younger. Shoulder to shoulder with the beaners harvesting, in silvaculture, in construction. We saw some natives, and immigrants from all over the world, but it was mainly wetbacks, and over the years they consolidated their positions (they are not shy about hiring only their own kind) and the natives got out.
BTW we never saw a black man...
No, most Americans won't do that work. Most of them couldn't do it if their lives depended on it. Too soft, too fat, too sick. As for the younger set... I think they will riot before they will pick tomatoes...
Get rid of the illegals and machines will get most of the new jobs. Gringos are not going to step up.
And a lot of the immigrants - like islamists - are just here to take advantage until they can conquer.
Maybe for farms. Meat packing... funny how that town that cleaned house saw Americans show up. Plenty will do construction or landscaping as well. Let the machines farm (tended to by American mechanics/engineers) and send the illegals packing. It'd be a net positive.
Need to get them off the phony blue voter rolls, too. But there's no form of cheating the treasonous globalist left won't stoop to. Therefore everything and everyone supporting them must be crushed or utterly destroyed, here and now.
But on the first issue remember those are all BIG packers. Partly personal... I grow my own. Or buy from local small farms. I have two butchers I generally use. They are both heavy in "hispanic" labor. Not entirely... One of them is in a native jurisdiction. There are quite a few natives in that operation. It is quite diverse, really.
Our slaughter company (mobile slaughter trucks) is owned by a white family. But there are others that are owned by south of the border people...
These outfits run a dual business, not that it matters much. My meat does not get inspected. But they do sell / handle inspected product.
The Democrats were willing to shutdown the government for over a month in order to keep immigrants on the government dole, which drives deficit spending, which drives inflation. It is not a major component, but it is one nonetheless. A lot of immigrants collect government benefits because they do not declare their income.
There is a wild amount of under the table work being done, and those people are not contributing anything to the overall system while they are collecting things like free medical care, housing assistance, food stamps etc.
Having a totally corrupted, politicized immigration policy, that cares only about destroying America (globalists) and retaining power (democrats) is not a positive way forward, independent of economics.
Hard to disagree with that. I think we could get a much better immigration policy. I could write out a better policy in 5 minutes with a pencil and a cocktail napkin.
I am not clear on your point. Are you saying it is a good thing to drive down their wages? That sucks for them and forces them on gov't subsidies. And it screws the middle class who ends up paying for this. As someone who is proud of grandparents who worked shitty jobs to allow their flourishing of families, the formula proposed sounds like permanent serfdom.
I was responding to Yuri’s suggestion that “mass deportations” would fix inflation. It will increase inflation and reduce American productivity by driving up the cost of low skilled labor.
Anybody can argue for deportations, but fighting inflation isn’t one of the reasons. I love saving money on landscaping, house cleaners, local Mexican food and so on.
This is another variation on privatizing the profits while pushing the cost onto the public. Illegal poor are a net cost to the united Sates. Getting rid of therm will lower public expense. It provides a better job for a legal citizen if the competition for low skill jobs is reduced. The lowering of wages through the importation of cheap labor is a big part of the financial problems of the United States. You get rid of the middle class (decent wages) you make the country poorer and increase the dependence on government assistance. This is not a new concept, Malthus talks about it in the late 1700's. Importing the poor in large numbers is a good way to make your nation poorer.
Trump has yet to attack the problem that supports immigration, specifically employers who give jobs to immigrants without regard to their legal employment status. This allows companies to hire below minimum wage, along with no benefits such as health care. Any on-the-job mishap is easily taken care of by carting the employee down to the nearest emergency room, where hospitals are legally required to take care of indigents for free, while jacking up your insurance and hospital fees.
If Trump's DOJ started to come down hard on such employers, handing out fines that bankrupt a few examples, it would put the fear of God into the rest, who would immediately lay off their illegal workers and refuse to hire more. Illegal immigrants would self-deport in droves, and ICE could just kick back and watch.
For hospitals, the US “healthcare” system is such an awful mess, because at every step in the process, the government intrudes between the physician and the patient. Until all that enormous waste, overhead, inefficiency, and corruption is done away with, the US medical system will just continue to deteriorate, along with the health of US citizens.
I've worked in defense for decades (until I let my clearance expire a few years ago). Cleared engineers used to be considered "assets" in the '80s, but are now "commodities". Naturalized citizens with US DoD clearances higher than secret were once rare - no doubt a complicated topic, but with the goal of trying to reduce divided loyalty problems. (I've heard the idea floated that 2nd gen US citizenship should be required for presidential candidates - I also think the idea of 2nd gen US citizenship for cleared work should be required).
In short, I've had to deal with people who have the option to move back to their home country. How is that a good thing for cleared engineering work?
Also - there has been a growing glut of PhDs at work where a good solid undergrad program once was sufficient. While HR has been going all DEI, there has been a subtle trend towards favoring the highest level of degree, for example a PhD in physics over a BS/MS in electrical engineering for electrical engineering work. And another subtle, but possibly dangerous trend: hiring naturalized citizens who don't even have degrees from US colleges.
You touched on another absolute scam: College degrees. I'm a great example of that as well. Had 20+ years of high-level tech specialist positions, but then left to work for myself for a few years as a freelancer. When I tried to return to the corporate world, guess what they demanded? A degree. Even though I had the qualifications. Sadly, I did return to get my degree (by 2019). Now I have school loans in addition to having jobs more out of reach than they ever were. The degrees won't save anyone. What they did was destroy things like corporate training, which is one area of many I have years of experience in. Now, it's flooded with people with higher degrees that escaped the absolutely corrupt college and university systems (I worked there too - so I know). They have ruined corporate training by making it 1000% more complex than it needs to be. THey infiltrated L&D and championed DEI. I wish they'd take their indoctrination and "pedagogy" and go the hell back to the universities. They can't though: Professors are paid crappy and they have no stability.
All of this was designed, of course. Corporations were somehow made to require degrees for everything thus pumping up the university/college industry. And it is an industry. And in turn they ensured we are enslaved with high interest loans for a a degree that is now increasingly useless.
I wish I never got mine, it has not helped me at all.
Re: PhD glut: I've been saying this for years but we are seriously overeducated in this country. Even in my industry where I have a BS in mechE then got a PE, I've forgotten 90% of the stuff they taught in school, and school didn't teach me 90% of the skills I need for my job.
We need more practical education not more degrees and letters behind your name. Also possible correlation... strong overlap in my experience of the worst engineers having more of said letters behind their name....
"...while lowering the cost of housing, education, and healthcare"
And food. Matt Walsh made this point nicely in his daily podcast a couple of weeks ago. Food stamps and the number of illegals getting them are making US pay more for groceries at the same time we're paying taxes so that the illegals can get free food...that's driving up the cost of food for us.
We need to be careful. First and foremost, close the door. Second, if we find you as the result of a felony or violent/fraudulent misdemeanor that has nothing to do with immigration, you go to jail and then you are permanently kicked out. I don't care about your esposa enferma or your niños pobres. Take them with you.
Busting someone's abuela that cleans their house who's been here for decades and hasn't done anything worse than get caught in a speed trap or honest white-collar foreign businesspeople with Fortune 1000 companies who don't have their papers in order is a bad look. There are plenty of much better opportunities to remove illegals that I dare the Dems to defend. Make a serious enough effort, and the honest illegals will do the right thing.
Commenting before finishing reading because this is extremely important and needs to be said, repeatedly, and loudly. (I am assuming you will say this)
> so will 50 year mortgages.
50 year mortgages are one of the most batshit insane things I have ever heard, and America will be condemning future generations into permanent debt-slave poverty by doing that.
Financing mechanisms like that, for housing, make housing get more expensive. Lots of nuance and moving parts to the full picture, but the gist of it works like this: everyone needs a place to live. So everyone will pay as much as they need to, for a place to live, assuming that they can. If you pass some new mechanism that makes it easier for people to pay for a place to live, now they _can_ pay more, and prices shift accordingly.
Once equilibrium is reached again, the net effect of a 50-year mortgage is to make the economy such that nobody will ever be able to afford a house without a 50-year mortgage, because of house price inflation caused by the 50 year mortgage's lower monthly payment enabling people to pay more in their monthly payment.
This is, in a sense, a democratic populace voluntarily voting to create an aristocracy and exclude their own children from it. Absolute madness
50 years are nothing but "rent with tax deduction" financing scheme, a quick fix sugar buzz elixir for a foundational society issue but a GREAT litmus test for the buy now pay later halfway house of addicts this nation has become.
way worse. What are the odds of you owning the car for 6 years? What are the odds in 2025 of someone staying in their home for 50 years? 50 year mortgage is a flat out ridiculous idea for anyone other folks benefiting from House sales.
Nobody owns a home; the state owns your home. Every state has property tax. Many folks have $30-$40,000 a year in tax payments on the home they supposedly own outright. Every homeowner in every corner of the country is leasing the right to stay there from the state.
Nobody owns a home; the state owns your home. Every state has property tax. Many folks have $30-$40,000 a year in tax payments on the home they supposedly own outright. Every homeowner in every corner of the country is leasing the right to stay there from the state.
Bought my first car in cash and second one on an 18-month loan, because I hate having debt.
I've actually run the numbers on it, and if I had taken a more active role in managing my assets, it would have been a good financial decision to take longer to pay off that loan, because good credit -> low interest rate -> arbitrage opportunity. Kinda proving my own point here.
In real life, the example given of the almost $300 savings going from a 30 year to a 50 year mortgage is a pipe dream. I was a mortgage banker for years, and the actual savings would probably be closer to $100--if you're lucky--because there's no lender in existence that will give you the same rate on a 50 year obligation as 30--just like 15 year loans have much better rates than 30. So stretching a loan out that far effectively makes it useless as a savings mechanism.
As I get older, I become more and more convinced that one way to view America's decline is "people unworthy of credit were lent way too much money".
I'm just a laymen, no background in accounting, finance, or economics, but 30 year _fixed-rate_ mortgages _offend_ me, and on a gut level, I feel like anyone who has one is a bad person. Getting a fixed rate on a 30 year loan is giving you a right not to have to adapt to a changing world for 30 years. That level of certainty is ridiculously expensive to guarantee, and it's incredibly arrogant and entitled to expect that level of certainty to be given to you from a bank just because they have a giant pile of money.
I know that this is ridiculously abstract and any real world version of this would be disastrous. But I believe, strongly, that if individual people were more exposed to the up and down risks of the universe, they would make wiser decisions. If people couldn't get loan terms for that long, or if the terms could not be fixed and people were more exposed to swings in interest rates, then people would buy more modest homes.
And if everyone did that, sellers wouldn't be able to charge as much, and prices would fall
"Once equilibrium is reached again, the net effect of a 50-year mortgage is to make the economy such that nobody will ever be able to afford a house without a 50-year mortgage, because of house price inflation caused by the 50 year mortgage's lower monthly payment enabling people to pay more in their monthly payment.
This is, in a sense, a democratic populace voluntarily voting to create an aristocracy and exclude their own children from it. Absolute madness"
That is entirely intentional.
To be fair, I doubt Trump intends any of this. He's not smart enough. He is, however, played like a cheap fiddle.
Knowing nothing beyond what I've read in this article (after deporting myself I stopped caring what America does), I assume that Trump just kinda said this, and that if he does intend it, his cabinet will stop him
Then again, I said that about tariffs, too, and look where that went.
I'm at a point in my life where I consider not owning a house to be representative of my failure, but when I was younger and had different factors to consider, I rented by choice because it was financially wiser for me.
I agree 50 year mortgages are a terrible idea. If we are going to to have a recession let’s limit it to home prices and see the drop. And I say this as a boomer that’s home is paid off. Either increase the supply of houses or see the price of existing homes crater.
I admit I have a Zillow addiction. House prices are just starting to come back down from the absolutely insane level that was the last 3-4 years. Not sure if this helps or hurts and who benefits yet, but there are too many examples of Governments helping out the little guy when in truth it was corporate welfare. My guess here is that this a way to prop up banks and real estate markets - admittedly my only expertise is watching home prices fall 😂
I'm honest enough to admit that I had not thought about the 50-year mortgage thing in this level of detail before reading this piece AND your comments. (And I like to think of myself as reasonably economically literate!) The part of the equation I had missed is the drive-toward-equilibrium factor you so wonderfully convey. "If you pass some new mechanism that makes it easier for people to pay for a place to live..." prices for places to live will rise as a result. Soon, only 50-year mortgages are affordable. The banks win. We lose. The pols get to claim victory either way. Geez! Massive props to you (and Senor Bad Cat) for the economics reminder.
The first place I encountered this kind of thinking, believe it or not, was Uncle Ted. If you haven't read his writings, you really should. The Industrial Revolution And Its Consequences Have Been A Disaster For The Human Race.
Towards the end of his manifesto, he uses the example of anti-depressants in modernity. Imagine a simple model of mental health, where you get more depressed as you have to deal with more stress. Now imagine that modern life makes people deal with more stress than they did historically. In fact, let's imagine that we're at equilibrium, and modern life makes people deal with the maximum amount of stress that it can, before people would start to break. After all, if modern life wasn't doing that, someone could make a profit somewhere changing modern life until it did.
So now, everyone's busting ass all day, and they're all super stressed out all day. And then a doctor invents anti-depressants. Now, you can take the anti-depressant, and feel a little less shitty. But when you feel a little less shitty, that means you could be stressed out more before hitting your breaking point.
If you're the only person who takes the anti-depressant, this gives you an edge over everyone else, and you can use that edge to just have a calmer life, or you could take on additional stress to make even more prosperity for yourself. But, if *everyone* takes the anti-depressant, now, if the employer is paying attention, he might notice that he can work everyone harder before they have panic attacks now. So he does.
After the chaos of a disruption subsides, you just end up at a new equilibrium. The system was already at equilibrium: it was giving people as much stress as possible, without breaking them. When you gave people the ability to better handle stress, it didn't result in them having less stress, because that's not where equilibrium was taking things. It resulted in them having more stress, such that their additional stress capacity immediately just got filled. Now, everything is still exactly the same, except everyone needs to take antidepressants every day or else the amount of stress they're under will break them.
Mortgage loan terms are the same thing. Make housing more affordable for one person, and you helped them. Make it more affordable for everyone, and you've just told the landlords that they can raise prices and people might complain but they won't actually do anything about it.
Didn't the Japanese try this? Late 80's? All I really remember is their economy hit the wall somehow because Japanese men quit coming to Yamhill county, Oregon to buy high end cutting horses to play cowboy. They were easy money.
In which one's progeny (born, or as-yet only imagined) are listed as co-borrowers (I'm sure there's a proper term for that), who are/will-be "on the hook" if Dad defaults. This could also be touted as an anti-abortion/birth-control argument.
I have no clue where he's going.....but one thing I have learned is this....dude pulls shit out of his ass all the time that no one saw coming.
I'm screwed either way, so I'm just watching the show.
I'm a small business owner in an industry being taken over by corporate. I don't have a 401K, but I do own real estate. Nobody gives two shits about me, my intersectionality score is next to zero...only ovaries keep it from being zero.
BUT...I have been swimming upstream my entire live and I'm not giving up yet.
Trump learns a lot by trial and error....which is horrifying to most people. They want certainty and he thrives on turmoil and uncertainty.
I don't know what he's up to, but I don't care because I have ALWAYS looked out for myself and made it work.
The government has never helped me and I minimize how it hurts me and I cannot believe most people don't think this way......quit waiting for a savior and save yourself. People made MONEY during the Great Depression....never forget that.
Throw away all the game plans....just react to what you see and give the public what it wants.
People don't get it--NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US! I voted for Trump 3 times but I definitely am not a Trumper and I think he's only president to further enrich himself and his family. It amazes me how so many people think that one billionaire is going to save us from his friends--all of the other billionaires.
I refuse to villainize 'billionaires.' That's just jealousy. If we were all billionaires, we'd be all for what they have. The key is to not worry about what people richer than us are doing. The key is to get our OWN house in order. We need to quit jumping every time something is said.
For instance, we have a very small cattle farm--beef. The market dropped significantly when Trump announced the Argentinian beef deal.....which feel through. Not a SINGLE Argentinian animal entered the market place and yet the prices cratered. Beats all I have ever seen. We need to quit knee jerking and just carry on.
Okay, I had to Google "intersectionality score" because I had never before heard the term. This website is the first thing that comes up ... It is pretty hilarious:
Yeah....nobody knows if it's satire or not....it's so damn absurd all the time now. I hear things and I'm like, 'Is this Saturday Night Live?'
It's all so surreal.
I was born in 1964....I am not built for this bullshit. I say what I mean and mean what I say. I don't make up little fantasy words or conditions.....I KNOW it's inevitable that I am gonna say the wrong thing to the wrong person....and GOD FORBID one of those manwomen walks into a lady's room with me.....I will spout off and I am pretty small so I might get squished. I just want people to be reasonable again.
Trump at least tries different things. The others arrogantly pretend they know what will or will not work despite a near total lack of training or experience to know such things, and on top of that they are oriented towards more or less maintaining the status quo even if it doesn't really "work" because they don't want to be held accountable for anything new that might fail.
Family logging business here. Just hoping we can swim upstream for 10 more years. I have been saying during this whole government shutdown that true freedom is not even noticing its shutdown.
Because we voted them all in without a great deal of thought in many cases. Seeing government for what it is, most sane people don't want anything to do with government, hence that role is left to mostly undesirables who learn how to fleece the taxpayers.
Over $100k is nowhere near a comfortable place to be right now. Anyone below mid-6 figures, at the *least,* is scared and struggling.
I think this is pure delusion combined with pure gaslighting. Don cannot pivot; he's incapable of it. He's economically illiterate. The only hope with this admin was that he would just do the opposite of what his enemies are doing, and that would luck into a sharp recession and some recovery.
But he can't, the GOP is going to get shellacked (and deserves to since they offer no solutions), the ship is going down and it's just a question of which brand of robbery and rape is visited upon the middle class.
Trump is playing to the crowd, and without serious progress on some other key initiatives (govt bloat, healthcare, illegal residency), his second presidency will be as unimpactful as the first.
It's apparent that the system needs to hard reset. Nobody has the stomach for it.
It's really frustrating, and it's really sad. I'm a grouchy old libertarian - I never have faith in the system. But there was an actual opportunity here, because he already had all the same enemies as his constituency, and he could have really scorched the earth without paying any more of a personal price than he already has.
We all feel that way. At almost 75, I have lived through the rise and fall of many movements We get attracted to some of them and reject others. MAGA is just the latest and very successful for a time. But every movement based on a cult of personality has a lifespan. People all have feet of clay. I have watched beatniks, hippies, "Abundant life" Christians, Maharishis, come and go. All offering pie in the sky. The most enduring utopian scam is communism. Never delivered what it promised and in the end was run by by extremely rich hucksters at the point of a gun.
Yep. But hope springs eternal in the human heart. Even though you know they are going to cave, you always want to believe that this guy, this one guy, might be the one who succeeds.
I was happier before I started watching. Ignorance is bliss.
Woefully large numbers of sheeple don't realize that utopia can never really exist and therefore repeatedly trying to vote in one or another utopian fantasy is a fruitless exercise. Yet, they keep revisiting that same tired old playbook under different guises.
Well, I’m still not sorry I cared. I wouldn’t say I feel betrayed. I had some long shot hopes that bore no reality to experience. But I stood with a true populist mandate and I can now solidly say that the GOP deserves nothing from me. Trump can’t create this wreckage alone, and they actually had some power. They used it the way they always do
Oh woe is me? Cut the bitching and fight. Alternatives are a dumpster fire. Trump’s the shittiest politician alive—still 1,000× better than the rest. GOP’s a rotting corpse of a party—still a million times less evil than the Democrat/Marxist scum running DC.
One side: “Fuck you, figure it out.” The other: “Vote for me, I’ll own your ass forever.”
Well, I always believe. I just don't need to be attached to the form things take. I continue to believe that Trump was the right call, but I don't know if that's because we're going to get through this the easy way or the hard way. He has opened cans that simply wouldn't be open, and I think that gets forgotten.
He has forced so many conversations into the public square that were not ever going to get there. We cannot move on until we have reckoned with reality, whether he does or not, and there is a lot of reality that people are reckoning with that they simply were not going to confront any time soon without him. I truly believe that.
I do not think this country survives in its current form, and I don't think it matters WHO is at the helm. But how we fall apart, and who we fall apart beside, does matter, and everyone needed to see that there simply is no political solution to the true ills here.
The Overton Window is still shifting away from liberalism towards post-liberal tribal politics, despite the enormous missteps of Trump. The modern left is nothing other than a coalition of groups demanding more fiscal transfers, and will support whatever politics (e.g. demographic change via immigration) delivers those fiscal transfers. The political left's policies are DOA and is not the basis for a long-term stable equilibrium.
Well we'll have to see how Zo pans out in NY. My hope is it's a total shit show and the AWFLs that came out in droves to elect him quickly show buyers remorse...but not before suffering for their choices.
It will be interesting to watch people at least partially wake up. Of course he will fail, primarily because he talked a good game to clueless young voters and got their votes, but he doesn't have the power as mayor to do what he claims he will do. He needs the cooperation of a lot of other government players who at some point early on will be thwarting everything he wants to do. Finally, those who voted him in may eventually turn against him and the pendulum will once again swing away from his idiocy. To some extent, it will be entertaining to watch everything unravel.
yes, more socialism is what is needed! from the frying pan into the fire....people get the government they deserve. (I realize you aren't saying you are supportive of it.)
"He's economically illiterate." Thank god for those economic geniuses such as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. Throw in a Paul Krugman or two as well. Everyone, and their brother knows that zero interest rates and quantitative easing in all its forms, is the saving grace of generations. [Jerome Powell is only a lawyer by training.]
I personally believe to 50-year mortgage is a bad idea. However, I think it is a symptom of something much worse.
The proposal, however, is economically literate. Japan and Switzerland have 100-year intergenerational mortgages for residences. It is a recognition of economic facts. Most consumers in the US buy the payment. A recent PNC Bank survey finds that 67% of workers live paycheck-to-paycheck. The payment amount is therefore very important.
The proposal recognizes there are 3 variables in PIN. Principal. Interest rate. Number of months of amortization. The only people in the US who want the principal to go down are first time buyers who want to own a home. [Principal being a proxy for price.] Interest rates are typical modelled off the 10-year treasury. [US Treasury issuing lots of short-term debt so as to lessen the impact on longer term rates like the 10-year.] That leaves the N in PIN.
How you get there is mainstream consensus economists heading the Federal Reserve. Greenspan, or Maestro as Bob Woodward memorialized him, facilitated houses becoming financial assets. He created a housing bubble, intentionally, to cover the dot.com bubble. When it blew, Bernanke using zero rates and quantitative easing, pushed the financialization toward its end-game. "You will own nothing". Powell then pushed the bubble up 50% over 5-years, making home ownership out of reach for many, if not most.
People keep underestimating Trump. Amazingly they continue to put their faith in the Fed and the economists that run the place. That 'independent' body, with its banks owned by private banks, with 5 of the 12 votes being theirs, is why we are talking about 50-year mortgages.
Perhaps "economically stupid" is a better phrase. My point in the original comment, which I thought would be self-evident, is that there are laws of economics that always will out in the end, and Trump, and most "economist," ignore or deny these realities. I consider that to be economic illiteracy. I suppose one could argue that having a solid grasp of Samuelson's text books constitutes economic literacy. I disagree. But sure, if we want to use a more Keynesian-style framework and say that buttons and levers on the side of policy manipulation will lead to short term changes in behavior, that's true. I guess the equivalent would be to say that someone who reads Marx and thinks he is correct is "literate."
So how does the economically literate deal with unaffordable housing in the US? How does it deal with China holding refined rare earth metals as a bargaining chip? How does it deal with China dominating chemical precursors, the production of medicines, energy infrastructure and much more?
Everything that is driving housing prices up is a result of bad policies of the past. Band aids will only make things worse for future generations. So much has been written about this. It’s a huge topic. But our money has been destroyed and Trump has tripled down on that, regulations at every level have made it very difficult to build and renovate, other regulatory burdens and influences have driven electricity and other utilities sky-high, Black Rock is using its financial leverage to outbid buyers…the Mises Institue has so many articles on this.
We can kick the can, but I care more about the opportunities that my children and their children will face than further institutionalizing the wealth gap through what is essentially a strategy to combine the worst of ownership and renting, without the benefits of either.
Yes, Greenspan is probably smarter than the rest. However, smart is a dime a dozen. I prefer wise and Greenspan was not that. He actually worried the world would run out of risk free assets against which to price all other assets. This was in response to those very small budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton admin. His mental model projected into the future the US would payoff its debt. As the result, there wouldn't be enough (or any) US Treasury securities to serve as risk free assets. This led to Greenspan doublespeak that allowed for the Bush tax cuts, which along with trillions spent on the GWOT and GFC led to the abundance of 'risk free' assets we have today.
Trump has no idea what he's doing. He's basically surrounded himself with a group of sycophantic, room temperature IQ yes-men who will promise Trump literally anything and tell him he's a God at every opportunity. Has absolutely no resemblance to the actual political movement that put Trump into power, which is as much a reaction against the deep state as anything. Trump will go down as one of the worst presidents of all time.
Yes to all. It is indeed an Idiocracy when the "conservative" party is promoting bigger debt, and free goodies and still allowing all the welfare and much of the grift. The lesser of two evils is still evil. But I guess it is better than the greater of the two.
The fix for our economic mess is "health care" spending. We are getting massively ripped off. If healthcare dropped back to 5% of gdp, we'd be in great shape (after unwinding the massive disruption to people living off the scam).
The giant ship of poor health (not healthcare), growing ever more grotesque over the past half century, will not turn on a dime but will likely take decades to correct.
50 year mortgages are code for interest-only loans. You are truly a caretaker for the bank’s property until you sell or default. Trump and the banks are probably still hoping for enough property market constrictions to keep housing prices trending above inflation for buyers to be consoled by rising property values when they won’t have actual equity, but that game has run its course. Fewer can afford to buy in the first place. The only way out of this mess is to stop spending (and incentivizing others to spend) on wasteful garbage that recycles back to the same old cronies.
One reason people have no equity is that much of their equity gets skimmed off by transaction fees. If you sell a house you can count on 10% of the price being skimmed in sales costs, much of which goes to realtors. If you own 20% equity in a house and the realtors skimmed off 5-6% it’s like a blood letting. In most countries realtor cost are 1-3% and there is no reason buyers and sellers couldn’t transact with something like Zillow and no realtor. The average family moves every 7 years, so this is a repeating process of losing much of your equity.
Mandatory title insurance is another scam. Why can’t the policy transfer from one owner to another? Maybe pay a few hundred for a new lien search. It costs thousands of dollars for title insurance on every sale. We really need to get rid of all the economic parasites and that will fix much.
Indeed. But those parasites seem to have offices and sponsors the local Little League in every podunk sclerotic, dying town in America. They keep the barriers to entry high. As I mentioned above, it’s all part of the “spending money on BS” that adds no value.
Interest only loans deservedly got a bad reputation in the last housing/financial crisis, so they've been rebranded with the term extended...yay, problem solved!
Agreed. Inbound ILLEGAL immigration has been stopped.
The friction ICE is creating in society might not be worth it. So, I would have shifted to ensuring that no illegals are receiving govt benefits. And we can't even do that.
The H-1B was heartening, but the corporations will find their way around that, no doubt.
Just so you all know, there's a bunch of confusion and misunderstanding regarding H-1Bs in the American populace.
(NOTE: I AM MOST CERTAINLY NOT GOING TO TELL YOU THAT THEY'RE GOOD.)
I am a Canadian who, until August, lived in the US. I did _not_ have an H-1B, I had a different, non-immigrant. I was trying to get an H-1B because Canada fuckin sucks, but I could not get one. Consequently, I understand the H-1B system a lot more than most.
The one thing that everyone seems to totally miss in the discussion is that they give out like 65,000 H-1Bs a year. In a country of 400,000,000 that's not enough to move the needle on employment numbers. It is not mathematically possible for the current H-1B system to be taking enough jobs to impact Americans, because there just aren't enough H-1Bs.
(NOTE: An H-1B is good for 6 years, so that means that unless people are just straight up breaking the law, there are never more than 400,000 H-1Bs in the United States. And if they _are_ breaking the law, it's not the H-1Bs specifically that are the problem, it's the not enforcing against the lawbreaking)
What the actual problem is is that they are specifically preferentially hiring H-1B employees from India. And the reason that they're doing this is so that managers can walk up on a Friday evening and say "hey, I'm gonna need you to work the weekend", and they know you won't say no, because if you say no you'll be deported back to India before you can file a wrongful termination suit.
The problem with this is that it creates a situation where employers want H-1B employees more than they want American ones, not because they're saving money, but basically because they can get away with abusing them and violating workplace laws. And, the really big problem is that once there's a critical mass of those kinds of employees at these companies, the companies can start forcing their US citizen employees to do that because "if you don't, we'll replace you with an H-1B"
The H-1Bs aren't directly impacting Americans' careers through job-stealing. What they are doing is impacting Americans' careers through getting employers hooked on employees who they can break the law with, which puts Americans (who can sue when you do that) at a competitive disadvantage.
> There just can't be too many situations where a foreigner has specific skills/experience not held by an American.
I generally agree, although I do feel compelled to defend that point. Just using my own career path as an example, people who are not deep in a particular field frequently cannot appreciate the nuances of expertise. Although, at the same time, cutting-edge world-class expertise is frequently less necessary than people believe.
Take me, for example. My job in 2017 required me to, by accident as a side effect of what I was doing, to become the world's expert in a particular software tool. I don't know exactly how you'd measure world expert, but I would bet money that in 2017, I was probably in the top ten worldwide of people with experience on this tool who were not paid to create it.
But, the particular thing I was using this expertise for was absolutely retarded. It was the kind of thing that sounded super cool to an engineer, but was absolutely retarded from a business perspective. I have a sneaking suspicion that my boss knew this, and to her, it was just free money from a banker to fuck around for a year doing something fun. So on the one hand, I, a non-American, was actually the world's expert in this thing. On the other hand, there was on economic merit to my expertise, so giving me a visa on the basis of that expertise would not have been rational. My only point is, this stuff is way more nuanced than people realize.
But in any case, I am not disagreeing with your general point, which if I understand it correctly, could be phrased as "we could deport all H1Bs tomorrow and everyting would be fine. Better maybe, even". As a non-American (Canada) who desperately wants to live in your country, I have a very personal interest in increasing H1Bs. But, I agree with you that it would be best for your country if you got rid of them.
Also, now that I think about it: if anything was about world class expertise, they wouldn't be talking about H1Bs, because the O1 visa exists. The O1 visa is the "extraordinary alien" visa, and it's given to people who are world class experts in whatever field, just because America doesn't want experts falling into enemy hands. So if anyone is ever saying they need H1Bs to get "world class" talent, or "the best", or anything like that, just ask them why they can't get O1s. There's no cap on O1s, either.
"The friction ICE is creating in society might not be worth it."
What friction? It's just the same idiot protestors that protest everything. They need to start throwing them in jail for years and you'll see how fast the "friction" ends.
We can't end government benefits to illegals because neither party wants to. The left openly doesn't, the right says empty things about it but in reality does nothing.
One thing I think you need to understand is who is administering these programs on a day to day level. If an illegal walks into a benefits office in East L.A. or submits a paper or online request he's very likely dealing with a guy who 1) is very likely himself Hispanic 2) has some kind of extended family member or ancestor who was himself illegal 3) belongs to some kind of employee union which at a deep, intuitive level depends on government support and growing the size of government and 4) hates Trump.
Think that might affect how their request is handled?
1.6 million have self-deported so far in 2025, the dead man walking administration let so many in that this is way worse than clean up on aisle 6. 50 yr mtg madness but this clean up can work if continued unlike DOGE which should be a program that never ends. Get prepared. These types of things will make u find out who real friends are
They may end up offering 50 year mortgages but that doesn't mean many people will want one. Only the low information home buyer will likely get sucked into that one. And such people would also have the option of creating their own 15 or 20 year payoff plan and not end up actually keeping that mortgage for 50 years, and paying it off early.
I don't think any bankrupt nation has ever evolved or policy changed back to prosperity. The success stories have been those that have completely, at least financially, collapsed and then rebuilt from scratch. Argentina is one such potential success story happening now. Germany and Japan. Panama post Noriega, etc. I hope that is not our trajectory but I fear it is.
> there is no case where subsidizing demand without increasing supply leads to better affordability.
It's been a long time since I've read his blog, but are you familiar with the writings of the economist Arnold Kling? This is basically his One Big Idea: almost every us government policy, in practice, involves subsidizing demand while restricting supply, and it predictably makes everything more expensive and doesn't ever fix anything ever.
(For one example, that I'm improvising so it might not be a great one: US policy regarding civic planning and zoning law artificially reduces housing density from market equilibrium, which drives up housing prices. The US responds by giving tax credits to home buyers, which subsidizes the price of housing but doesn't stop artificially reducing the density. The result is that housing is still scarce, but is now more expensive, because the people selling housing price in the tax credit since they know you'll get it)
He might state the argument too strongly, or too broadly, but, I am strongly aligned with his take
Sounds a lot like the Austrian School of economics. Every government action is like pushing on a wet bit of string. People adapt their behaviour accordingly and it ends up achieving nothing but making things worse by distorting markets.
But their promises all sound great, and who doesn't want "free" stuff?
I can't tell if you're accusing me of being Austrian economically to discredit me, or to agree with me. I wouldn't say I'm an Austrian economist, but I've definitely been accused of sympathizing with the Chicago school before.
In any case, your rephrasing there is more or less exactly what I'm saying. I agree with your comment, I just can't tell if it was sincere or sarcastic
Gato - I always appreciate your insights though this time I'll nitpick:
a) with the permanent lien called "property taxes" no one truly owns their homes in the US
b) 30 year, 50 year matters, and yes $200+ matters on a monthly budget as it makes the difference between eating or not eating for many families, or a bit of entertainment if they were eating
c) few people hold a mortgage to maturity: they either refinance or make extra payments to pay it off sooner. Mortgage is based on "morte" or death... finance till death, or as Jason Hartman (big RE investor) is wont to say: Refi till ya die.
Or as the late Richard Russell used to write: Inflate or die.
Thanks for taking the time to respond (first time ever - sheds tear)
Some places it makes MUCH more sense to rent (ex: big Cali cities or coastal FL communities where you can rents for 20% of the monthly nut: $2M house for $6,000-8,000/month vs. Memphis $150K house for $1,200 month).
Memphis will go tend to go up slow and steady but the other property prices will gyrate wildly. Memphis will rent for almost 1% of purchase price whereas the FL house will rent for less than 0.5%.
I've done a lot of investing over the years. RE is a big challenge but building equity goes to the owner of homes in linear markets.
One can park his/her money in a bank at 3% interest and get crushed by inflation;
or s/he can buy crypto, gold, silver and try to tread water with inflation.
Wall Street is a den of thieves but I do know common people, widows, who've tripled, quadrupled their money and outsmarted the thieves. Good for them. That's not my game.
With hyperinflation it's going to be a good challenge for everyone to keep from drowning. In 40 years that payment will seem puny if the dollar even exists.
you need quite a lot for it to make sense, a mortgage is a large, highly leveraged, long term commitment and if you're living within on hiccup of not being able to pay it, it's a desperately bad bet.
we saw this in the 2008 home ownership cargo cult where the government mistook "being a homeowner" for "being middle class." it's not like that. it runs the other way. you reach a level of income and stability and you become a homeowner.
if you lack this, taking on a mortgage is a financial death trap.
The 2004-2007 "NINJA" loans were pure fraud with the loan originators participating fully in order to skim the up-front commission and walk away as the loans were sliced into tranches and their debts rehypothecated.
This is exactly right. If 200 2025 dollars a month is the difference between a 30 year mortgage and renting for you, you need to rent. If all you have is 2400 dollars extra a year, the first major maintenance requirement your home needs will break you and/or put you deeper into debt that will only get deeper.
If you get paid 26x a year, one check should fully cover your housing with T&I. this shakes out to roughly the old rule of thumb that housing should be 30% of your gross income, or don't buy a house for more than 3x your salary.
200 extra dollars a month should not make the difference in a decision like this.
The rates are not permanent; instead, they change daily.
People can (and do) take advantage of refinancing and using different lending products, like velocity lending, that can put you ahead of the game. It takes planning and discipline.
Some people arbitrage by renting in overpriced cyclical markets and being landowners in underpriced linear markets.
The mortgage is fixed, so starting with $200/month extra can turn into $300, then $400 and $500 (as it has for us, repeatedly) through financing.
Years ago my friend sat on his hands as he was waiting for the "big crash" rather than buying. OK. He's still on the sideline years later. Ironically, Hartman just talked about this 5 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AOZ52jzDKs
A great source for learning about RE is Jason Hartman.
Where I live mortgages are often substantially cheaper than rent for similar properties. If you have pets there are often times when there are no properties at all of any price available for rent. Even without pets your options are often limited to really crappy houses for rent or wildly overpriced apartments. A mortgage payment on a small home right now is half what many of the apartments cost.
Around here that’s a non-existent problem. The reason around here that people don’t rent to pet owners is because pets tend to be destructive to homes and renting pet owners tend to be irresponsible. Cats get sick and urinate on carpets which may get superficially but not deep cleaned. Dogs chew up stuff and destroy the grass with their urine and feces.
Building equity is one thing, but building a community and staying in one place (one school system) is another. You get to keep the upgrades, the paint scheme, the memories. Back to the 1% rule:
You can get a property (I'll go back to Memphis where you can STILL get a property for $70-100K and rent it for $700-$1,000 with a $550-$800 50-year mortgage) - you can own/live there or rent and come out ahead. You're at 1%.
> “With middle and lower income consumers, they’re under a lot of pressure. If you’re upper income earning over $100k, things are good. Stock markets are near all time highs. You’re feeling, quite confident about things. You’re seeing international travel, all those barometers of upper income consumers are doing quite well. What we see with middle and lower income consumers is actually a different story.
There is an under-discussed factor in this: salary inflation over the past fifteen years. I don't know how significant this is, it might not matter.
I am a software engineer. Fifteen years ago, I made six figures, and the other white collar non-engineering professionals I worked with, like marketing or AMs or whatever, made like 50k
Now, I am a software engineer, I make six figures, and those jr. HR and marketing and AM employees are making 80-100k, because inflation. Software engineering salaries did go up, but not proportionally; where ten years ago we would be making 2x what those other professionals made, now we're making like 30% more.
All of this is to say, the quote from the mcdick's CEO could be overlooking the fact that a significantly larger number of white-collar Americans are making over $100k than ten years ago. $100k isn't that big of a number anymore.
My gut check is that there are a few trends:
* Inflation makes all numbers bigger while purchasing power decreases
* Tech opulence has made comfortable salaries _more_ accessible to lower skilled white collar workers
* Tech layoffs, on the other hand, have made corporate jobs less accessible in general.
I do not know where these various trends net out, it is clearly worse than ten years ago but I don't think just looking at it by current-year income like that tells the whole story.
The tariff payouts felt like a preemptive strike on SCOTUS to me, "now it will be your fault people don't get their checks" kind of message to get them to decide Trump is right about his powers in this area as the case arguments didn't seem favorable.
Betting markets are now overwhelmingly predicting the tariffs get tossed out. This will be good for inflation and longer term for Trump (saving him from himself). Oddly it will be the best case scenario, as Trump got other countries to lower their barriers, and now we will lower ours. Free trade will be a net benefit.
You can’t have a economy for wage and salary employees if all the jobs have been shipped overseas and the remaining service jobs are filled by imported third worlders. If you have a solution that doesn’t involve tariffs let’s hear it, but the current system has been in place since the ‘80s at least and nobody has done jack to alter the trajectory of domestic job destruction.
1) The highest living standards of any large country since the advent of agriculture ten thousand years ago.
2) Higher growth rates and lower unemployment for the past thirty years than other developed countries (such as Europe and Japan)
3) Greater reduction in global poverty than ever before, enriching billions of lives.
As I said in my initial comment I am not arguing for open borders. If I was to lay out an economic plan it would be off topic. I can do so if you really want me to, but it would involve no tariffs, millions of hard working English speaking legal immigrants, lower welfare payments, lower government regulation, and outsourcing (where economic) of lower skilled manufacturing to lower skilled countries. We should focus on skilled labor, entrepreneurial ideas and capital and a healthy service economy (where most jobs have actually been for developed nations for the past 75 years).
The interesting thing to me about the first Manufacturing graph is the wild swings that took place between Jan 2020-Jul2023. I think every economist's use of that span as some kind of data point should be attributed with an asterisk. Due to the pandemic, manufacturing went from "normal" to negative, then way overdone due to companies retooling to make ventilators. I was part of the electronic component shortage for two years where we couldn't supply enough product so cars left the plant without some onboard components. It was an insane time that shouldn't be used as a baseline for anything.
The unsustainable national debt was nearly $37 Trillion dollars when Trump was inaugurated and had surpassed the GDP in 2022.
Now, since the BBB included 1 trillion dollars for the Department of Offense (War), the national debt is over 38 trillion dollars and further surpassing the GDP until one day in the near future when the natural consequenses of such irresponsible spending blows it up completely: https://lizlasorte.substack.com/p/americas-debt-clock-keeps-going-higher?r=76q58
I think Don is probably in over his head on this one, as you said. This AI crap is going to burst at some point, I think people are getting fed up with it. AI is great for certain applications, but trying to jam it into everything is just fucking annoying at this point.
The only way to make America affordable again is mass deportations. That will protect American workers' wages while lowering the cost of housing, education, and healthcare. MAGA Econ/Polisci 101: increase supply, decrease demand, reward allies, punish adversaries: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
It's a solid step, but isn't enough.
Reducing govt bloat and curtailing the out-of-control health care system is also key.
And frustratingly, the shutdown was perhaps his best chance to accomplish the former, and that seems to have passed.
I think some of that will come as a result of mass deportations.
But you're right about the "former" shutdown. I was hoping the size of the federal government would be severely slashed.
Mass deportations aren't happening, unfortunately.
They're killing themselves to get a few here and there. And creating friction with voters.
Much more effective would be to end govt entitlements to illegals. And it's common sense. And NOT being done.
Ending government entitlements to illegals is like making me buy pseudoephedrine directly from the pharmacist because you can make meth with it. The meth is not being cooked from retail boxes at the CVS. Meth is being made by components purchased through shill pharmacies. Illegals are not entitled to government aid, and yet, here we are. If you want to put a stop to this, put a stop the NGOs that are running the fraud.
Use 8 USC 1324 to arrest the ceo's of the biggest employers of the invaders. If the ceo of Tyson was perp walked, facing hundreds of ten year felonies, nobody would ever hire an illegal again. Problem solved. Arrest everyone who even said good morning to the guy who murdered Lakken Riley and the game would be over.
There's no logical argument for stopping illegal immigration if you believe in racial equality. The latter is incompatible with the former. Most people are terrified little cowards about being called 'racist'. They have no effective logical arguments against that accusation. It's weak to say that immigration laws must be enforced, because the left will always make you feel guilty and immoral by insisting that such laws are racist to begin with.
Since everyone in the US has been brainwashed to believe in racial equality, therefore illegal immigration will continue forever (duh). Beliefs have consequences, and rotten beliefs result in rotten consequences. Here's the bottom line: until and unless the masses of people in the US embrace race realism, they will always be unwitting pawns of the left, endowing leftists with the moral authority to continue their agenda of taking over every aspect of society. The longer conservatives avoid this issue, the longer the left will stay in control, to the endless confusion of conservatives. No wonder conservatives have conserved nothing over the last 70 years, not even women's bathrooms.
I absolutely believe in racial equality, and racial equality has nothing to do with illegal entry to this or any country. New citizens of any nationality (or religion) should be background-checked and carefully vetted as to their suitability for American citizenship. America first, yes?
Oh, oh, prepare yourself for another “screed” !!!! Because I'm a patient, logical man, I'll try to get through to you one more time.
Unbeknownst to yourself, your mind is filled with cognitive dissonance. You want to accept only one facet of racial equality, and conveniently ignore the rest of its assumptions that would negate whatever you seem to be supporting regarding immigration. (BTW, since you've never completely explained what all those beliefs are, you are deliberately keeping everyone who's trying to discuss this issue in the dark, which is to your benefit. You can change your arguments on the fly, and nobody can call you on it for inconsistency. It's a quintessential postmodernist tactic, beloved of leftists.)
If you believe in racial equality, then there is no logical reason to vet anyone who desires to immigrate. They are all equally qualified. But if for some reason their skill sets differ, then the blank slate assumption of racial equality means that their life in a new environment will increase their expertise in whatever may be lacking at the point they immigrated. Thus such inevitable improvement means they should not be prevented from immigration in the first place. You are preventing a culturally-handicapped immigrant from overcoming the obstacles of their poor environment in their original country.
If you believe in racial equality, there is no reason to even have immigration laws, because not only are all immigrants economically beneficial to their new country, there is more importantly no MORAL reason to keep them out. If you keep them out, that is an immoral judgment about their innate character. You are being judgmental, and any immigration laws are immoral to begin with. You have no factual reason to judge immigrants as being unable to benefit the social cohesion and moral fiber of the community. Again note that whatever skill set they may or may not have is unrelated to, and has no impact on, this issue.
As to what I say, or how I say it being a “screed”, that is typical reversion to yet another mindless leftist slur. That's essentially all you people have, no logical discourse, instead just kneejerk spewing of slurs such as “fascist”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “screed”, and on and on and on. Leftists foist off a lazy accusation about someone writing a “screed”, so that they don't have to do the hard work of actually responding intelligently point-by-point. It's the old trick of attacking the messenger, so that you can ignore the hard issues contained in the message.
It's long past time for leftist ninnies such as yourself to either re-examine your inconsistent set of beliefs, or else shut the hell up. But I don't expect you'll do either one, since the essence of leftism is not having the self-awareness to examine your own beliefs. I won't be responding again, so feel free to act like an infant and have the last word with a continuation of your fact-free assertions and ad hominems. Have a nice day, y'all, buh-bye!
This, thank you.
According to your stated beliefs, that means your mind is drowning in cognitive dissonance. Why? To prove it, here's woke leftist logic:
If you believe in racial equality, then you believe that all people are born the same, a blank slate at birth shaped by factors within their environment. They all have the same, equal built-in talents and skills. But nonwhite people who want to immigrate to the US don't usually have a good education or material wealth. Such people didn't have the right things in their environment to help them get a good education, maintain good health, and acquire material wealth. They must have been treated unfairly by their society because they are not white. The US must have treated their societies unfairly because they are nonwhite societies. Restrictive US immigration laws are racially discriminatory, because they prevent these poor nonwhite people from improving their lives. It is racially discriminatory to enforce those laws, so if you support those laws you are a racist.
Cognitive dissonance: you are a racist who supports racially discriminatory immigration laws, but you also believe in racial equality.
Here's non-leftist logic: It doesn't matter what you call yourself, you are actually a leftist, because racial equality is THE primary leftist belief. Here's proof: leftists are mentally incapable of seeing inconsistencies in their thinking. Your leftist mindset means you have no self-awareness about what you are thinking or saying or doing. Which means you won't believe me when I say that you have cognitive dissonance. Just like every leftist, you will then respond to me with postmodernist nonsense, where whatever your personal selfish feelings about an issue happen to be, they supercede objective facts and consistent logic. Like all leftists, you will justify your muddy thinking by using even more muddy thinking. You start with an assumption (racial equality), but then you don't like the logical conclusions that result from that assumption. Instead of changing your assumption, you try to justify it by using illogical, muddy, specious reasoning.
Anyway, this is all very tiresome, because you obviously will never learn. I always hope people like you will wake up and be ashamed of your poor thinking and fake moral beliefs, but that never happens, so this is all just a waste of my time. Have a nice day and all that, buh-bye.
What a rant, full of delusion and stupidity. There's a wonderful concept. It's called Education. You should try it sometime!
Ah yes, a "rant", a "screed". That's typical reversion to yet another mindless leftist slur. It's essentially all you people have, no logical discourse, instead just kneejerk spewing of slurs such as “fascist”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “screed”, and on and on and on. You people are absolutely unable to do any self-examination. You're convinced you don't have to, since you are morally superior and can ignore anything your designated enemy may have to say. Leftists foist off a lazy accusation about someone writing a “screed”, so that they don't have to do the hard work of actually responding intelligently point-by-point. It's the old trick of attacking the messenger, so that you can ignore the hard issues contained in the message. Anyway, keep up the great work, chuck-0 !!!
Ah, very good, exactly what I expected from a leftist ninnie. No logical argumentation that addresses the issues, just a few ad hominems, coated with the reek of sanctimonious, pseudo-intellectual arrogance. It's amusing to see that it triggered you, since the truth tends to do that with liars and fakes.
As for the rant, I took care to simplify it for the obviously dumb audience that prompted it in the first place. But even then, it's obviously far too nuanced for NPC's like you. Have fun with all that, chuck-0, ta-ta!
u tellem buddy!
It appears that at the moment the french and Irish have decided racial equality is not all that important but their violated women are.
major paki bashing going on there now…
Agreed.
The "Healthcare system" that owns The Beltway and MSM.
It’s a system alright, but healthcare doesn’t have anything to do with it. The senators holding the taxpayers’ feet to the fire to cover ACA “premiums” (great word) should have been talking to the insurers—figure out how to cut the premiums or your tax bills (corporate and personal) just doubled. I know, that’s as possible as a 50 yr mortgage. But they work by sound bytes.
Healthcare has EVERYTHING to do with it. That monster has grown to consume 1/5 of the economy. No amount of playing with insurance or premiums will do a damn thing to help. COSTS must come down. That is the only way to fix it.
I agree. It’s not just insurers. It’s the unholy alliance of hospitals, pharma and insurers that made this problem. Costs of care are inflated to cover “overhead” — not so much the MRI equipment say, as sales, marketing, admin staff to push the paperwork around, liability, and yes profits. How much does blue cross spend to blitz me with “open enrollment!” pitches? How many ads do you see, hear for ozempic? Even Trump wants to pitch it. “Only $50!” How many folks in the doc office, let alone the hospital, are there to process insurance info? “Do you have have insurance?” replaced “How are you today?” a long time ago. I’m no expert, but even I can see the flaws in this “system.” Health seems to be at the bottom of the list.
The only way is a word no one likes to fear. ration healthcare. Not everyone can have open heart surgery, chemotherapy ad infinitum, mri’s til the cows come home, scans for every little problem etc
It's already rationed. You get as much as you can afford.
Deportations will wiggle the supply demand curve.
Coming down hard on the AMA and the rest who are preventing the training of more physicians would help. (Not sure that is legal. How about establishing a parallel structure for training? Competition?)
But the problem will only get worse as long as people treat themselves like shit. The main reason care is cheaper in other parts of the West is they are healthier.
I have proposed the following several times. It never gets any attention. I think it would put the cork in the bottle:
50% of Americans get tax-free healthcare from their employer. even considering their deductibles this is a powerful incentive to use the system. And some of us got a way better deal. I retired from Ed. My insurance was excellent, and my deductible was tiny.
So...
Tax the healthcare benefits according to use. Every policy has an inherent value that can be defined. My former employer laid out about $10,000 a year for each of us. Yes, I know they got a good deal.
So let's say the policy is worth $10,000. Let's say I use $1500 in a year. That $1500 should be taxed as income.
Tax right up to face value. After face, no more tax. If I use $15,000, I am taxed on $10,000.
You might include a waiver for truly catastrophic illness.
Divert that money into making the "system" solvent.
That will "bend the curve." Bet on it.
Too many people are cavalier about using the system. Maybe they would think harder if it was taxed?
Well you found a "never get elected again" solution. Some people do have real catastrophic problems. I have had surgery for a life threatening, but noncancerous, growth. It was genetic (two cousins have had the same thing happen). Taxing me on top of that would be a f**king insult.
So you believe you are entitled to tax free income?
BTW if you get tax free income, shouldn't everyone get an equivalent benefit? Make EVERYTHING related to healthcare non-taxed? Even supplements? Some people use natural medicine. Where is their cut?
And I did say a catastrophic waiver...
We need to remember where this all comes from. FDR gave us national healthcare, but only for the privileged people... The ones that made the war go. It grew from there. The government treats this as a tax EXPENDITURE, because revenue is forgiven...
Obamacare should have been called Baucuscare. The legislation counterintuitively originated in the Senate finance committee. That is because the expenditure already was on the books.
Today 50% of the people have employer paid healthcare. Even if you pay into it your employer almost certainly pays a bigger share. 25% of everybody is on medicaid. About 19% are on medicare. Oh, and they penalize the shit out of you if you don't sign up promptly at retirement. You better not have to change your mind... They are nicking me for just under $200 a month. I get doctor visits and a couple of generic prescriptions.
So maybe 93 or 94% of everyone is already getting some government funding or other. The subsidies that shut down the government go to some medicaid recipients in "non-expanded medicaid" states and people who don't get medicaid who buy in the marketplaces. That last group is a portion of the people in that 6 or 7% who aren't otherwise covered. I don't think it is known how many people are uninsured.
It seems to me that small % is mighty costly. But do recall that projected "$1.5 trillion" is a ten year figure. These BIG numbers are always ten year.
The get the rich theory was originally that marketplace purchasers could afford it...
It doesn't matter. This is pulling us under. But I'm sure there will be people arguing this even as the deck slides under the waves beneath their feet.
The out of control health system will only be curtailed with a restructuring of delivery systems to smaller entities, focused on preventative care and everyday infectious process or minor accidents. It is only the current litigious climate that fuels massive referral to specialists. When the smallest mistake on the independent practitioner merits a state health board review, large multistate hospitals get a pass. Vertical monopolies, large multi state hospital chains have not only gutted quality of care but also resulted in massive escalation in charges.
How much will GLP 1s help?
Was hoping el gato would comment on inflationary impacts of tens of millions of illegals. Must be impacting food, rent, mortgage, health care and definitely car insurance.
Economics can be extremely complex (and inherently nebulous).
Somethings are simple:
a 30 year mortgage is better than one for 50 - a 20 year mortgage (I had one), is better than one for 30 yrs.
The most important thing is the ratio of average income to average home price - nobody talks about that.
The impact of BlackRock scarfing up SFD needs to be stopped and reversed; and the impact of massive immigration needs to be understood and reckoned with.
And then there’s the increasing disparities in income. A 50 yr mortgage is a lot like a student loan
Institutional investors should never have been allowed to buy SFD. Not sure they should be allowed to buy multi-family either. This is a massive policy failure.
There's a difference here between what's best for the individual vs what's best for society. A 30-yr mortgage is great for the individual (given the current low (and subsidized) interest rates, one can use the additional savings to invest and easily beat the interest rate). I'm not sure what the optimal loan duration is for society but thirty years for any purchase seems to be approaching rentier status.
Those people you are deporting are driving prices down on the low skilled jobs that they fill. Cooks, landscapers, nannies, etc.
I am in no way arguing for open borders, but immigration isn’t the problem with inflation (nor is importing goods).
How many housing units are available after 20-30 million illegals deport???
Because Americans want those 75 year old shacks in the Barrio with 17 people crammed inside. Get real. Immigrants add more to housing in their labor than they take.
Was the illegal alien Superintendent of Des Moines IA living in a shack while making 350k per year. Is the illegal alien mayor of Coldwater KS living in a shack? We are infiltrated on every level, not just barrios. What houses did the illegal aliens buy with OUR FHA loans. You are talking out of your ass!!
No he's right. Most of the aliens are crammed into tiny spaces. That is in fact how this has always ran. Aliens, legal or otherwise, have mostly always started on the bottom.
Two differences now and then: Welfare, obviously.
The frontier. There has been talk of opening up Federal lands to more homesteading. Maybe?
Low wage immigrants might add to the pie, but the benefits are all tilted to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. There is only one way to increase living standards - increase per capita productivity. And there is only one way to continuously increase per capita productivity - investment in production technology. Bringing in low-skill, low-cost workers lowers per capita productivity, but it allows the wealthy to shift more money to themselves in the form of increased profits.
Lower skilled workers/immigrants can either hurt or help productivity, depending upon how they are used and whether they complement or replace more skilled workers, and how or whether those “increased profits” you mention are invested
Overall productivity is not as important as per capita productivity. You can increase overall productivity while lowering per capital productivity. The question I would pose is: If a business becomes more profitable by replacing higher paid workers with lower paid workers (regardless of skill level), do you really believe that business will reinvest profits into worker productivity? Or will they invest in expansion by undercutting the competition in a race to the bottom? Here's an example: When Trump started deportations during his first term, meatpacking plants could not find enough cheap immigrant labor to meet operational requirements, so they began 8nvesting heavily in automation. When Biden became president, they stopped the investment and started hiring illegal labor again. Business will almost always invest in the quickest easiest way to make money.
Are Americans really going to do all the jobs the immigrants did, for the same wage?
Turn off the EBT, section 8, Medicaid, and I bet you they will find work.
2 Thessalonians 3:10
"For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat".
I have no problem with the needy, my issue is with the lazy!
Hey there you go. Advice from long dead jew barbarians... Idiot...
Why don’t you work and feed them all big man??
Hunger is a great motivator.
Not a chance.
Supply and demand.
There is a huge illegal population, and they represent a demand on the housing market (and food, and transportation, and healthcare.) They may be the one single biggest reason for inflation in these areas.
And as you point out, they increase the supply of labor, which drives wages downward.
It's a double whammy to legitimate citizens: Higher prices, lower wages.
The distortion in the health care markets occasioned by illegal immigrants is the requirement that hospitals built with Hill Burton (federal funding) support any and all who present to the emergency room. With the free access to the system, comes all the legally mandated requirements for comprehensive health care. Look at the losses of most hospitals serving illegals, low income and uninsured - all of whom receive their basic medical care through the ER: They are cratering on bad, uncollectible debt. These hospitals are essentially funding health care for all (for many unreimbursable services) out of the pockets of those who can pay. Cue the rise of "specialty" hospitals, essentially funded by hedge fund financiers, who have no such requirements and do not maintain any form of ER or urgent care to avoid such populations.
The cement guy waiting for a job outside your local Home Depot is not competing with you for new single family housing. He is trying to help build that housing at lower prices via his lower wages. His house is the 75 year old shack with 5 people bunking in the garage located in the barrio. His wife is the person cooking at the local restaurant for half the $20 per hour required by Newsom for fast food wages.
Low skilled labor does not drive up the cost of living for higher skilled labor. It complements it. Yes, it will drive down wages for similarly low skilled native workers. But let me ask a question… who are these Americans who are unable to develop their skills in 18 years so that they have to compete with uneducated Guatemalans that can’t even speak English? If the best job you can get can be taken by a Spanish speaking watermelon picker, then you are either an idiot or a bum. People reading this blog are not bums or idiots, and their competition for jobs and homes is not coming from someone named Juan or Juanita.
Deporting Juan or Juanita may be a good or bad idea. But it is not going to fix your cost of living unless your state or local government is forcing you to fund their welfare or medical care.
First, I live in a 150 year old house. Don't presume that only destitute people live in old houses.
Governments are spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to take care of illegals. True enough, governments spend all kinds of money on all kinds of boondoggles. I'd go so far as to say our biggest problem isn't illegals, it's governments.
Now, a question: Do those illegals have driver's licenses? Auto insurance? Worker's comp? Health insurance? Liability insurance? Have they gone thru the same background check that all legitimate workers have to go thru before they can be hired, in order to MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT ILLEGAL?
Fair enough… I agree the problem is governments, and that the immigrants here should be legally vetted.
Now an answer... Of course not.
You are correct.
Have you ever done that work? I did, for many years when I was younger. Shoulder to shoulder with the beaners harvesting, in silvaculture, in construction. We saw some natives, and immigrants from all over the world, but it was mainly wetbacks, and over the years they consolidated their positions (they are not shy about hiring only their own kind) and the natives got out.
BTW we never saw a black man...
No, most Americans won't do that work. Most of them couldn't do it if their lives depended on it. Too soft, too fat, too sick. As for the younger set... I think they will riot before they will pick tomatoes...
Get rid of the illegals and machines will get most of the new jobs. Gringos are not going to step up.
And a lot of the immigrants - like islamists - are just here to take advantage until they can conquer.
Maybe for farms. Meat packing... funny how that town that cleaned house saw Americans show up. Plenty will do construction or landscaping as well. Let the machines farm (tended to by American mechanics/engineers) and send the illegals packing. It'd be a net positive.
Need to get them off the phony blue voter rolls, too. But there's no form of cheating the treasonous globalist left won't stoop to. Therefore everything and everyone supporting them must be crushed or utterly destroyed, here and now.
Yes I mostly agree.
But on the first issue remember those are all BIG packers. Partly personal... I grow my own. Or buy from local small farms. I have two butchers I generally use. They are both heavy in "hispanic" labor. Not entirely... One of them is in a native jurisdiction. There are quite a few natives in that operation. It is quite diverse, really.
Our slaughter company (mobile slaughter trucks) is owned by a white family. But there are others that are owned by south of the border people...
These outfits run a dual business, not that it matters much. My meat does not get inspected. But they do sell / handle inspected product.
The Democrats were willing to shutdown the government for over a month in order to keep immigrants on the government dole, which drives deficit spending, which drives inflation. It is not a major component, but it is one nonetheless. A lot of immigrants collect government benefits because they do not declare their income.
There is a wild amount of under the table work being done, and those people are not contributing anything to the overall system while they are collecting things like free medical care, housing assistance, food stamps etc.
And sending whatever is left over back home from whence they came.
Having a totally corrupted, politicized immigration policy, that cares only about destroying America (globalists) and retaining power (democrats) is not a positive way forward, independent of economics.
Hard to disagree with that. I think we could get a much better immigration policy. I could write out a better policy in 5 minutes with a pencil and a cocktail napkin.
I agree. The failure to bring manufacturing back home contributes significantly.
How? How do you bring manufacturing back without tariffs and ending the dollar as the reserve currency?
Cut corporate taxes. And think outside the US mainland box. Look at our territories, that depend largely on a single sector: tourism.
You’re a real retard if you think cutting corporate taxes will bring back manufacturing jobs. It will only increase buybacks and c-suite pay.
You know Joel MD, you can make your point without being an insulting ass.
I am not clear on your point. Are you saying it is a good thing to drive down their wages? That sucks for them and forces them on gov't subsidies. And it screws the middle class who ends up paying for this. As someone who is proud of grandparents who worked shitty jobs to allow their flourishing of families, the formula proposed sounds like permanent serfdom.
I was responding to Yuri’s suggestion that “mass deportations” would fix inflation. It will increase inflation and reduce American productivity by driving up the cost of low skilled labor.
Anybody can argue for deportations, but fighting inflation isn’t one of the reasons. I love saving money on landscaping, house cleaners, local Mexican food and so on.
This is another variation on privatizing the profits while pushing the cost onto the public. Illegal poor are a net cost to the united Sates. Getting rid of therm will lower public expense. It provides a better job for a legal citizen if the competition for low skill jobs is reduced. The lowering of wages through the importation of cheap labor is a big part of the financial problems of the United States. You get rid of the middle class (decent wages) you make the country poorer and increase the dependence on government assistance. This is not a new concept, Malthus talks about it in the late 1700's. Importing the poor in large numbers is a good way to make your nation poorer.
Trump has yet to attack the problem that supports immigration, specifically employers who give jobs to immigrants without regard to their legal employment status. This allows companies to hire below minimum wage, along with no benefits such as health care. Any on-the-job mishap is easily taken care of by carting the employee down to the nearest emergency room, where hospitals are legally required to take care of indigents for free, while jacking up your insurance and hospital fees.
If Trump's DOJ started to come down hard on such employers, handing out fines that bankrupt a few examples, it would put the fear of God into the rest, who would immediately lay off their illegal workers and refuse to hire more. Illegal immigrants would self-deport in droves, and ICE could just kick back and watch.
For hospitals, the US “healthcare” system is such an awful mess, because at every step in the process, the government intrudes between the physician and the patient. Until all that enormous waste, overhead, inefficiency, and corruption is done away with, the US medical system will just continue to deteriorate, along with the health of US citizens.
Yeah that's a distraction.
It's not illegal immigrants who I'm competing against to get a job. It's other professionals with experience from this country, for the most part.
I've worked in defense for decades (until I let my clearance expire a few years ago). Cleared engineers used to be considered "assets" in the '80s, but are now "commodities". Naturalized citizens with US DoD clearances higher than secret were once rare - no doubt a complicated topic, but with the goal of trying to reduce divided loyalty problems. (I've heard the idea floated that 2nd gen US citizenship should be required for presidential candidates - I also think the idea of 2nd gen US citizenship for cleared work should be required).
In short, I've had to deal with people who have the option to move back to their home country. How is that a good thing for cleared engineering work?
Also - there has been a growing glut of PhDs at work where a good solid undergrad program once was sufficient. While HR has been going all DEI, there has been a subtle trend towards favoring the highest level of degree, for example a PhD in physics over a BS/MS in electrical engineering for electrical engineering work. And another subtle, but possibly dangerous trend: hiring naturalized citizens who don't even have degrees from US colleges.
You touched on another absolute scam: College degrees. I'm a great example of that as well. Had 20+ years of high-level tech specialist positions, but then left to work for myself for a few years as a freelancer. When I tried to return to the corporate world, guess what they demanded? A degree. Even though I had the qualifications. Sadly, I did return to get my degree (by 2019). Now I have school loans in addition to having jobs more out of reach than they ever were. The degrees won't save anyone. What they did was destroy things like corporate training, which is one area of many I have years of experience in. Now, it's flooded with people with higher degrees that escaped the absolutely corrupt college and university systems (I worked there too - so I know). They have ruined corporate training by making it 1000% more complex than it needs to be. THey infiltrated L&D and championed DEI. I wish they'd take their indoctrination and "pedagogy" and go the hell back to the universities. They can't though: Professors are paid crappy and they have no stability.
All of this was designed, of course. Corporations were somehow made to require degrees for everything thus pumping up the university/college industry. And it is an industry. And in turn they ensured we are enslaved with high interest loans for a a degree that is now increasingly useless.
I wish I never got mine, it has not helped me at all.
Re: PhD glut: I've been saying this for years but we are seriously overeducated in this country. Even in my industry where I have a BS in mechE then got a PE, I've forgotten 90% of the stuff they taught in school, and school didn't teach me 90% of the skills I need for my job.
We need more practical education not more degrees and letters behind your name. Also possible correlation... strong overlap in my experience of the worst engineers having more of said letters behind their name....
"...while lowering the cost of housing, education, and healthcare"
And food. Matt Walsh made this point nicely in his daily podcast a couple of weeks ago. Food stamps and the number of illegals getting them are making US pay more for groceries at the same time we're paying taxes so that the illegals can get free food...that's driving up the cost of food for us.
We need to be careful. First and foremost, close the door. Second, if we find you as the result of a felony or violent/fraudulent misdemeanor that has nothing to do with immigration, you go to jail and then you are permanently kicked out. I don't care about your esposa enferma or your niños pobres. Take them with you.
Busting someone's abuela that cleans their house who's been here for decades and hasn't done anything worse than get caught in a speed trap or honest white-collar foreign businesspeople with Fortune 1000 companies who don't have their papers in order is a bad look. There are plenty of much better opportunities to remove illegals that I dare the Dems to defend. Make a serious enough effort, and the honest illegals will do the right thing.
Gato please debunk this nonsense
That carries an underlying assumption that none of those deported are doing work Americans can step up and do...
You could start by deporting those on public assistance. But this will be politically impossible.
Commenting before finishing reading because this is extremely important and needs to be said, repeatedly, and loudly. (I am assuming you will say this)
> so will 50 year mortgages.
50 year mortgages are one of the most batshit insane things I have ever heard, and America will be condemning future generations into permanent debt-slave poverty by doing that.
Financing mechanisms like that, for housing, make housing get more expensive. Lots of nuance and moving parts to the full picture, but the gist of it works like this: everyone needs a place to live. So everyone will pay as much as they need to, for a place to live, assuming that they can. If you pass some new mechanism that makes it easier for people to pay for a place to live, now they _can_ pay more, and prices shift accordingly.
Once equilibrium is reached again, the net effect of a 50-year mortgage is to make the economy such that nobody will ever be able to afford a house without a 50-year mortgage, because of house price inflation caused by the 50 year mortgage's lower monthly payment enabling people to pay more in their monthly payment.
This is, in a sense, a democratic populace voluntarily voting to create an aristocracy and exclude their own children from it. Absolute madness
50 years are nothing but "rent with tax deduction" financing scheme, a quick fix sugar buzz elixir for a foundational society issue but a GREAT litmus test for the buy now pay later halfway house of addicts this nation has become.
I shudder to think of all the morons that think a 50 year mortgage will be helpful to them.
My first mortgage was a 40 year (yes they offered for a while in the early 90s). I quickly realized how insane they were.
Window dressing to the uneducated.
It's a gift to the corporate interests that already rule this country.
Imagine all those oligarchs licking their lips about now.
Akin to the 6 year car loan!
way worse. What are the odds of you owning the car for 6 years? What are the odds in 2025 of someone staying in their home for 50 years? 50 year mortgage is a flat out ridiculous idea for anyone other folks benefiting from House sales.
I have a 2011 Toyota Camry, 255,000 miles on it. Owned it for 14 years. Still running, still drive it.
Nobody owns a home; the state owns your home. Every state has property tax. Many folks have $30-$40,000 a year in tax payments on the home they supposedly own outright. Every homeowner in every corner of the country is leasing the right to stay there from the state.
Nobody owns a home; the state owns your home. Every state has property tax. Many folks have $30-$40,000 a year in tax payments on the home they supposedly own outright. Every homeowner in every corner of the country is leasing the right to stay there from the state.
Bought my first car in cash and second one on an 18-month loan, because I hate having debt.
I've actually run the numbers on it, and if I had taken a more active role in managing my assets, it would have been a good financial decision to take longer to pay off that loan, because good credit -> low interest rate -> arbitrage opportunity. Kinda proving my own point here.
It should also be noted that reducing interest rates via central bank policy has the same effect of driving up selling prices
In real life, the example given of the almost $300 savings going from a 30 year to a 50 year mortgage is a pipe dream. I was a mortgage banker for years, and the actual savings would probably be closer to $100--if you're lucky--because there's no lender in existence that will give you the same rate on a 50 year obligation as 30--just like 15 year loans have much better rates than 30. So stretching a loan out that far effectively makes it useless as a savings mechanism.
As I get older, I become more and more convinced that one way to view America's decline is "people unworthy of credit were lent way too much money".
I'm just a laymen, no background in accounting, finance, or economics, but 30 year _fixed-rate_ mortgages _offend_ me, and on a gut level, I feel like anyone who has one is a bad person. Getting a fixed rate on a 30 year loan is giving you a right not to have to adapt to a changing world for 30 years. That level of certainty is ridiculously expensive to guarantee, and it's incredibly arrogant and entitled to expect that level of certainty to be given to you from a bank just because they have a giant pile of money.
I know that this is ridiculously abstract and any real world version of this would be disastrous. But I believe, strongly, that if individual people were more exposed to the up and down risks of the universe, they would make wiser decisions. If people couldn't get loan terms for that long, or if the terms could not be fixed and people were more exposed to swings in interest rates, then people would buy more modest homes.
And if everyone did that, sellers wouldn't be able to charge as much, and prices would fall
"Once equilibrium is reached again, the net effect of a 50-year mortgage is to make the economy such that nobody will ever be able to afford a house without a 50-year mortgage, because of house price inflation caused by the 50 year mortgage's lower monthly payment enabling people to pay more in their monthly payment.
This is, in a sense, a democratic populace voluntarily voting to create an aristocracy and exclude their own children from it. Absolute madness"
That is entirely intentional.
To be fair, I doubt Trump intends any of this. He's not smart enough. He is, however, played like a cheap fiddle.
Knowing nothing beyond what I've read in this article (after deporting myself I stopped caring what America does), I assume that Trump just kinda said this, and that if he does intend it, his cabinet will stop him
Then again, I said that about tariffs, too, and look where that went.
Trump is a bullshitter, in Professor Frankfurter's sense of the word.
That said, his cabinet (and Trump himself) clearly are seeking to get what they can for themselves while they can.
Don't be fooled. Trump is SUPER smart. And he plays EVERYONE (including you, evidently) like said fiddle.
His own appointees ("only the best people") have used words like "moron" to describe him.
"When you get in debt you become a slave."
Andrew Jackson
> it’s just adding leverage to the system and that leverage will rapidly express as higher prices as prospective buyers are more able to bid up price.
Yep, you did go on to say the same thing I'm saying
The utter idiocy of trying to make housing "more affordable" by stimulating even more demand should be obvious to anyone with 2 brain cells.
This assumes that the intent of "making housing more affordable" is in fact to make housing more affordable.
A somewhat questionable assumption, FF.
50-year mortgages don't sound like a great deal... but consider renting. I'm currently paying an infinity-year mortgage on my apartment.
I've never owned real estate in my life.
I'm at a point in my life where I consider not owning a house to be representative of my failure, but when I was younger and had different factors to consider, I rented by choice because it was financially wiser for me.
Never owned anything either. It's priced beyond my means, where I live.
https://gameofrent.com/
I agree 50 year mortgages are a terrible idea. If we are going to to have a recession let’s limit it to home prices and see the drop. And I say this as a boomer that’s home is paid off. Either increase the supply of houses or see the price of existing homes crater.
I admit I have a Zillow addiction. House prices are just starting to come back down from the absolutely insane level that was the last 3-4 years. Not sure if this helps or hurts and who benefits yet, but there are too many examples of Governments helping out the little guy when in truth it was corporate welfare. My guess here is that this a way to prop up banks and real estate markets - admittedly my only expertise is watching home prices fall 😂
They "...will own nothing and (NOT!) be happy."
Techno-Feudalism, intergenerational debt-servitude.
I'm honest enough to admit that I had not thought about the 50-year mortgage thing in this level of detail before reading this piece AND your comments. (And I like to think of myself as reasonably economically literate!) The part of the equation I had missed is the drive-toward-equilibrium factor you so wonderfully convey. "If you pass some new mechanism that makes it easier for people to pay for a place to live..." prices for places to live will rise as a result. Soon, only 50-year mortgages are affordable. The banks win. We lose. The pols get to claim victory either way. Geez! Massive props to you (and Senor Bad Cat) for the economics reminder.
The first place I encountered this kind of thinking, believe it or not, was Uncle Ted. If you haven't read his writings, you really should. The Industrial Revolution And Its Consequences Have Been A Disaster For The Human Race.
Towards the end of his manifesto, he uses the example of anti-depressants in modernity. Imagine a simple model of mental health, where you get more depressed as you have to deal with more stress. Now imagine that modern life makes people deal with more stress than they did historically. In fact, let's imagine that we're at equilibrium, and modern life makes people deal with the maximum amount of stress that it can, before people would start to break. After all, if modern life wasn't doing that, someone could make a profit somewhere changing modern life until it did.
So now, everyone's busting ass all day, and they're all super stressed out all day. And then a doctor invents anti-depressants. Now, you can take the anti-depressant, and feel a little less shitty. But when you feel a little less shitty, that means you could be stressed out more before hitting your breaking point.
If you're the only person who takes the anti-depressant, this gives you an edge over everyone else, and you can use that edge to just have a calmer life, or you could take on additional stress to make even more prosperity for yourself. But, if *everyone* takes the anti-depressant, now, if the employer is paying attention, he might notice that he can work everyone harder before they have panic attacks now. So he does.
After the chaos of a disruption subsides, you just end up at a new equilibrium. The system was already at equilibrium: it was giving people as much stress as possible, without breaking them. When you gave people the ability to better handle stress, it didn't result in them having less stress, because that's not where equilibrium was taking things. It resulted in them having more stress, such that their additional stress capacity immediately just got filled. Now, everything is still exactly the same, except everyone needs to take antidepressants every day or else the amount of stress they're under will break them.
Mortgage loan terms are the same thing. Make housing more affordable for one person, and you helped them. Make it more affordable for everyone, and you've just told the landlords that they can raise prices and people might complain but they won't actually do anything about it.
"...America will be condemning future generations into permanent debt-slave poverty by doing that."
That's the point of it, but you can't sell it with those words.
Why not 100-year mortgages?
https://ogre.substack.com/p/50-year-mortgages-will-not-make-america
Didn't the Japanese try this? Late 80's? All I really remember is their economy hit the wall somehow because Japanese men quit coming to Yamhill county, Oregon to buy high end cutting horses to play cowboy. They were easy money.
In which one's progeny (born, or as-yet only imagined) are listed as co-borrowers (I'm sure there's a proper term for that), who are/will-be "on the hook" if Dad defaults. This could also be touted as an anti-abortion/birth-control argument.
I have no clue where he's going.....but one thing I have learned is this....dude pulls shit out of his ass all the time that no one saw coming.
I'm screwed either way, so I'm just watching the show.
I'm a small business owner in an industry being taken over by corporate. I don't have a 401K, but I do own real estate. Nobody gives two shits about me, my intersectionality score is next to zero...only ovaries keep it from being zero.
BUT...I have been swimming upstream my entire live and I'm not giving up yet.
Trump learns a lot by trial and error....which is horrifying to most people. They want certainty and he thrives on turmoil and uncertainty.
I don't know what he's up to, but I don't care because I have ALWAYS looked out for myself and made it work.
The government has never helped me and I minimize how it hurts me and I cannot believe most people don't think this way......quit waiting for a savior and save yourself. People made MONEY during the Great Depression....never forget that.
Throw away all the game plans....just react to what you see and give the public what it wants.
Here, here! Well said!
People don't get it--NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US! I voted for Trump 3 times but I definitely am not a Trumper and I think he's only president to further enrich himself and his family. It amazes me how so many people think that one billionaire is going to save us from his friends--all of the other billionaires.
I refuse to villainize 'billionaires.' That's just jealousy. If we were all billionaires, we'd be all for what they have. The key is to not worry about what people richer than us are doing. The key is to get our OWN house in order. We need to quit jumping every time something is said.
For instance, we have a very small cattle farm--beef. The market dropped significantly when Trump announced the Argentinian beef deal.....which feel through. Not a SINGLE Argentinian animal entered the market place and yet the prices cratered. Beats all I have ever seen. We need to quit knee jerking and just carry on.
Nobody with half a brain wants the government to save us.
Okay, I had to Google "intersectionality score" because I had never before heard the term. This website is the first thing that comes up ... It is pretty hilarious:
https://intersectionalityscore.com/
The funniest part of this website is that I literally cannot tell whether or not it is supposed to be satire. (Hey, isn't that one of Gato's laws ..?)
Yeah....nobody knows if it's satire or not....it's so damn absurd all the time now. I hear things and I'm like, 'Is this Saturday Night Live?'
It's all so surreal.
I was born in 1964....I am not built for this bullshit. I say what I mean and mean what I say. I don't make up little fantasy words or conditions.....I KNOW it's inevitable that I am gonna say the wrong thing to the wrong person....and GOD FORBID one of those manwomen walks into a lady's room with me.....I will spout off and I am pretty small so I might get squished. I just want people to be reasonable again.
Trump at least tries different things. The others arrogantly pretend they know what will or will not work despite a near total lack of training or experience to know such things, and on top of that they are oriented towards more or less maintaining the status quo even if it doesn't really "work" because they don't want to be held accountable for anything new that might fail.
Otherwise known as "bread and circuses".
Family logging business here. Just hoping we can swim upstream for 10 more years. I have been saying during this whole government shutdown that true freedom is not even noticing its shutdown.
This is all true but then why do we have a government (tyrant) on our backs?
Because we voted them all in without a great deal of thought in many cases. Seeing government for what it is, most sane people don't want anything to do with government, hence that role is left to mostly undesirables who learn how to fleece the taxpayers.
Over $100k is nowhere near a comfortable place to be right now. Anyone below mid-6 figures, at the *least,* is scared and struggling.
I think this is pure delusion combined with pure gaslighting. Don cannot pivot; he's incapable of it. He's economically illiterate. The only hope with this admin was that he would just do the opposite of what his enemies are doing, and that would luck into a sharp recession and some recovery.
But he can't, the GOP is going to get shellacked (and deserves to since they offer no solutions), the ship is going down and it's just a question of which brand of robbery and rape is visited upon the middle class.
Phenomenal comment.
Trump is playing to the crowd, and without serious progress on some other key initiatives (govt bloat, healthcare, illegal residency), his second presidency will be as unimpactful as the first.
It's apparent that the system needs to hard reset. Nobody has the stomach for it.
It's really frustrating, and it's really sad. I'm a grouchy old libertarian - I never have faith in the system. But there was an actual opportunity here, because he already had all the same enemies as his constituency, and he could have really scorched the earth without paying any more of a personal price than he already has.
And he squandered every penny of that capital.
And now we're left feeling betrayed.....again.
After thirty five years of watching intently you'd think I'd learn.
We all feel that way. At almost 75, I have lived through the rise and fall of many movements We get attracted to some of them and reject others. MAGA is just the latest and very successful for a time. But every movement based on a cult of personality has a lifespan. People all have feet of clay. I have watched beatniks, hippies, "Abundant life" Christians, Maharishis, come and go. All offering pie in the sky. The most enduring utopian scam is communism. Never delivered what it promised and in the end was run by by extremely rich hucksters at the point of a gun.
Yep. But hope springs eternal in the human heart. Even though you know they are going to cave, you always want to believe that this guy, this one guy, might be the one who succeeds.
I was happier before I started watching. Ignorance is bliss.
Woefully large numbers of sheeple don't realize that utopia can never really exist and therefore repeatedly trying to vote in one or another utopian fantasy is a fruitless exercise. Yet, they keep revisiting that same tired old playbook under different guises.
Well, I’m still not sorry I cared. I wouldn’t say I feel betrayed. I had some long shot hopes that bore no reality to experience. But I stood with a true populist mandate and I can now solidly say that the GOP deserves nothing from me. Trump can’t create this wreckage alone, and they actually had some power. They used it the way they always do
Oh woe is me? Cut the bitching and fight. Alternatives are a dumpster fire. Trump’s the shittiest politician alive—still 1,000× better than the rest. GOP’s a rotting corpse of a party—still a million times less evil than the Democrat/Marxist scum running DC.
One side: “Fuck you, figure it out.” The other: “Vote for me, I’ll own your ass forever.”
Pick your poison.
It's all poison.
Still I look to find a reason to believe
Well, I always believe. I just don't need to be attached to the form things take. I continue to believe that Trump was the right call, but I don't know if that's because we're going to get through this the easy way or the hard way. He has opened cans that simply wouldn't be open, and I think that gets forgotten.
He has forced so many conversations into the public square that were not ever going to get there. We cannot move on until we have reckoned with reality, whether he does or not, and there is a lot of reality that people are reckoning with that they simply were not going to confront any time soon without him. I truly believe that.
I do not think this country survives in its current form, and I don't think it matters WHO is at the helm. But how we fall apart, and who we fall apart beside, does matter, and everyone needed to see that there simply is no political solution to the true ills here.
A fear that I have is the Overton Window shifting way left and we get more socialists elected in 2026 and 2028.
Waiting on Overton Window 12. 11 does not work.
Good Schwab there, matey!!! :D
The Overton Window is still shifting away from liberalism towards post-liberal tribal politics, despite the enormous missteps of Trump. The modern left is nothing other than a coalition of groups demanding more fiscal transfers, and will support whatever politics (e.g. demographic change via immigration) delivers those fiscal transfers. The political left's policies are DOA and is not the basis for a long-term stable equilibrium.
Plus they really haven't sorted out a real message and don't have a person that can articulate it without letting on they have TDS.
100%
I did NOT have that on my bingo card.
Well we'll have to see how Zo pans out in NY. My hope is it's a total shit show and the AWFLs that came out in droves to elect him quickly show buyers remorse...but not before suffering for their choices.
Definitely going to be interesting.
It will be interesting to watch people at least partially wake up. Of course he will fail, primarily because he talked a good game to clueless young voters and got their votes, but he doesn't have the power as mayor to do what he claims he will do. He needs the cooperation of a lot of other government players who at some point early on will be thwarting everything he wants to do. Finally, those who voted him in may eventually turn against him and the pendulum will once again swing away from his idiocy. To some extent, it will be entertaining to watch everything unravel.
I hope that too, but am in agreement with your first comment. If layoffs increase more, lord only knows.
yes, more socialism is what is needed! from the frying pan into the fire....people get the government they deserve. (I realize you aren't saying you are supportive of it.)
If we do, we do. The GOP don’t deserve my vote. It’s all coming down one way or another.
Throw in his foreign policy and we have a real disaster in the making.
True story.
New king is the same as the old.
"He's economically illiterate." Thank god for those economic geniuses such as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. Throw in a Paul Krugman or two as well. Everyone, and their brother knows that zero interest rates and quantitative easing in all its forms, is the saving grace of generations. [Jerome Powell is only a lawyer by training.]
True, that. Not like "economic literacy" has lead to any stunning revelations. Better off listening to astrologists.
"Free trade will make everyone better off. NAFTA will not cause job loss" More LOL
Economically literate, to me, means you actually understand economics. I don’t think those clowns do, either. They’re quants and phonies.
I personally believe to 50-year mortgage is a bad idea. However, I think it is a symptom of something much worse.
The proposal, however, is economically literate. Japan and Switzerland have 100-year intergenerational mortgages for residences. It is a recognition of economic facts. Most consumers in the US buy the payment. A recent PNC Bank survey finds that 67% of workers live paycheck-to-paycheck. The payment amount is therefore very important.
The proposal recognizes there are 3 variables in PIN. Principal. Interest rate. Number of months of amortization. The only people in the US who want the principal to go down are first time buyers who want to own a home. [Principal being a proxy for price.] Interest rates are typical modelled off the 10-year treasury. [US Treasury issuing lots of short-term debt so as to lessen the impact on longer term rates like the 10-year.] That leaves the N in PIN.
How you get there is mainstream consensus economists heading the Federal Reserve. Greenspan, or Maestro as Bob Woodward memorialized him, facilitated houses becoming financial assets. He created a housing bubble, intentionally, to cover the dot.com bubble. When it blew, Bernanke using zero rates and quantitative easing, pushed the financialization toward its end-game. "You will own nothing". Powell then pushed the bubble up 50% over 5-years, making home ownership out of reach for many, if not most.
People keep underestimating Trump. Amazingly they continue to put their faith in the Fed and the economists that run the place. That 'independent' body, with its banks owned by private banks, with 5 of the 12 votes being theirs, is why we are talking about 50-year mortgages.
Perhaps "economically stupid" is a better phrase. My point in the original comment, which I thought would be self-evident, is that there are laws of economics that always will out in the end, and Trump, and most "economist," ignore or deny these realities. I consider that to be economic illiteracy. I suppose one could argue that having a solid grasp of Samuelson's text books constitutes economic literacy. I disagree. But sure, if we want to use a more Keynesian-style framework and say that buttons and levers on the side of policy manipulation will lead to short term changes in behavior, that's true. I guess the equivalent would be to say that someone who reads Marx and thinks he is correct is "literate."
So how does the economically literate deal with unaffordable housing in the US? How does it deal with China holding refined rare earth metals as a bargaining chip? How does it deal with China dominating chemical precursors, the production of medicines, energy infrastructure and much more?
Everything that is driving housing prices up is a result of bad policies of the past. Band aids will only make things worse for future generations. So much has been written about this. It’s a huge topic. But our money has been destroyed and Trump has tripled down on that, regulations at every level have made it very difficult to build and renovate, other regulatory burdens and influences have driven electricity and other utilities sky-high, Black Rock is using its financial leverage to outbid buyers…the Mises Institue has so many articles on this.
We can kick the can, but I care more about the opportunities that my children and their children will face than further institutionalizing the wealth gap through what is essentially a strategy to combine the worst of ownership and renting, without the benefits of either.
Greenspan knew better. He just caved. The rest are dumb as rocks.
Yes, Greenspan is probably smarter than the rest. However, smart is a dime a dozen. I prefer wise and Greenspan was not that. He actually worried the world would run out of risk free assets against which to price all other assets. This was in response to those very small budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton admin. His mental model projected into the future the US would payoff its debt. As the result, there wouldn't be enough (or any) US Treasury securities to serve as risk free assets. This led to Greenspan doublespeak that allowed for the Bush tax cuts, which along with trillions spent on the GWOT and GFC led to the abundance of 'risk free' assets we have today.
John Paulson, the investor who traded his way to a vast fortune during GFC, endowed a chair at NYU in Greenspan's name. That is a pretty backhanded compliment, or not. https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/news-events/uat_024050
Well said. Now, instead of risk free return Green span hoped for, we have return free risk!
A lot of voters said in effect "this administration is not what I voted for in 2024".
Most elections seem to have a similar result.
It was not what DJT said would happen either. "Peace president" LOL
I had Trump figured out about a week into his first term. The man is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
It's not an act. There is no eleven dimensional chess, no master plan here. He acts like a buffoon because he is a buffoon.
At this point, there might well be no other way to interpret his actions.
You and marku52 just don't get it. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Of course, any day now, The Great Pumpkin will rise up from the pumpkin patch for all the good little boys and girls....
Politicians say what they have to in order to get elected. It's that simple.
And if the "policy announcement" happens to benefit their donor class well all the better.
Yes...that is Political Lesson #1.
Trump has no idea what he's doing. He's basically surrounded himself with a group of sycophantic, room temperature IQ yes-men who will promise Trump literally anything and tell him he's a God at every opportunity. Has absolutely no resemblance to the actual political movement that put Trump into power, which is as much a reaction against the deep state as anything. Trump will go down as one of the worst presidents of all time.
And you have not even mentioned one Jeffrey Epstein.
Yes to all. It is indeed an Idiocracy when the "conservative" party is promoting bigger debt, and free goodies and still allowing all the welfare and much of the grift. The lesser of two evils is still evil. But I guess it is better than the greater of the two.
The fix for our economic mess is "health care" spending. We are getting massively ripped off. If healthcare dropped back to 5% of gdp, we'd be in great shape (after unwinding the massive disruption to people living off the scam).
Do you read Karl Denninger? For example, see https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=254362 and https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=254377
This is a big one.
"Health" care is a massive vampire squid sucking the face of America (to paraphrase Taibbi)
Big scam....a$k Obama.
Scammer gonna scam - and he is a prince scammer/liar/cheat.
The giant ship of poor health (not healthcare), growing ever more grotesque over the past half century, will not turn on a dime but will likely take decades to correct.
50 year mortgages are code for interest-only loans. You are truly a caretaker for the bank’s property until you sell or default. Trump and the banks are probably still hoping for enough property market constrictions to keep housing prices trending above inflation for buyers to be consoled by rising property values when they won’t have actual equity, but that game has run its course. Fewer can afford to buy in the first place. The only way out of this mess is to stop spending (and incentivizing others to spend) on wasteful garbage that recycles back to the same old cronies.
One reason people have no equity is that much of their equity gets skimmed off by transaction fees. If you sell a house you can count on 10% of the price being skimmed in sales costs, much of which goes to realtors. If you own 20% equity in a house and the realtors skimmed off 5-6% it’s like a blood letting. In most countries realtor cost are 1-3% and there is no reason buyers and sellers couldn’t transact with something like Zillow and no realtor. The average family moves every 7 years, so this is a repeating process of losing much of your equity.
Mandatory title insurance is another scam. Why can’t the policy transfer from one owner to another? Maybe pay a few hundred for a new lien search. It costs thousands of dollars for title insurance on every sale. We really need to get rid of all the economic parasites and that will fix much.
this.
Indeed. But those parasites seem to have offices and sponsors the local Little League in every podunk sclerotic, dying town in America. They keep the barriers to entry high. As I mentioned above, it’s all part of the “spending money on BS” that adds no value.
Until you sell, default... or pay off the loan.
Many 15/20/30 year loans go out 14-16 years for whatever reason (BK, move, refi, pay off early)
With hyperinflation (incoming!) people can pay off big debts with cheaper dollars.
Dollar depreciation has been horrendous in the past 100 years.
Can print more dollars, cannot print more houses.
The land and the house hold value, the dollar does not.
Mortgage at 6-8% is reasonable considering the end game of the dollar.
those paying off the debt with cheap dollars will be the lucky ones who can keep their jobs through the whole thing.
Maybe, maybe not. Have to figure out multiple revenue streams in case job lost.
That's how I got more heavily into the "game" - thought Convid would cost my day job.
Good point. There’s probably an arbitrage between mortgages and currency markets in there that the Soros clan has already cornered.
What gets tolerated, continues.
Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market and were imprisoned.
Soros (thief) cornered the bank of England and got away with yet another crime.
No doubt his cabal continuing to scalp the public.
"50 year mortgages are code for interest-only loans."
This needs to be repeated, over and over.
Interest only loans deservedly got a bad reputation in the last housing/financial crisis, so they've been rebranded with the term extended...yay, problem solved!
This $2k payment is just window dressing while the Titanic continues to take on water.
Trump, as many have suspected, seems to be incapable of addressing the things that need to be done (perhaps nobody would be capable).
Ending illegal immigration and deporting millions of illegals
Getting unqualified recipients off of entitlement rolls
Drastically reducing bureaucratic bloat - the shutdown, his biggest chance to do this, is now over
Forcing states to curtail wasteful spending.
This is all straightforward stuff, and he's made precious little progress on any of this. And all of it is required to save this country.
In fairness he HAS ended additional illegal immigration--he's basically closed the borders. Look up the numbers
ICE is trying to root people out of her but look at the pushback they are getting. It's not like Trump isn't trying.
H-1Bs continue apace which is disapointing.
Agreed. Inbound ILLEGAL immigration has been stopped.
The friction ICE is creating in society might not be worth it. So, I would have shifted to ensuring that no illegals are receiving govt benefits. And we can't even do that.
The H-1B was heartening, but the corporations will find their way around that, no doubt.
Just so you all know, there's a bunch of confusion and misunderstanding regarding H-1Bs in the American populace.
(NOTE: I AM MOST CERTAINLY NOT GOING TO TELL YOU THAT THEY'RE GOOD.)
I am a Canadian who, until August, lived in the US. I did _not_ have an H-1B, I had a different, non-immigrant. I was trying to get an H-1B because Canada fuckin sucks, but I could not get one. Consequently, I understand the H-1B system a lot more than most.
The one thing that everyone seems to totally miss in the discussion is that they give out like 65,000 H-1Bs a year. In a country of 400,000,000 that's not enough to move the needle on employment numbers. It is not mathematically possible for the current H-1B system to be taking enough jobs to impact Americans, because there just aren't enough H-1Bs.
(NOTE: An H-1B is good for 6 years, so that means that unless people are just straight up breaking the law, there are never more than 400,000 H-1Bs in the United States. And if they _are_ breaking the law, it's not the H-1Bs specifically that are the problem, it's the not enforcing against the lawbreaking)
What the actual problem is is that they are specifically preferentially hiring H-1B employees from India. And the reason that they're doing this is so that managers can walk up on a Friday evening and say "hey, I'm gonna need you to work the weekend", and they know you won't say no, because if you say no you'll be deported back to India before you can file a wrongful termination suit.
The problem with this is that it creates a situation where employers want H-1B employees more than they want American ones, not because they're saving money, but basically because they can get away with abusing them and violating workplace laws. And, the really big problem is that once there's a critical mass of those kinds of employees at these companies, the companies can start forcing their US citizen employees to do that because "if you don't, we'll replace you with an H-1B"
The H-1Bs aren't directly impacting Americans' careers through job-stealing. What they are doing is impacting Americans' careers through getting employers hooked on employees who they can break the law with, which puts Americans (who can sue when you do that) at a competitive disadvantage.
tldr: it's not about money it's about control.
Doesn't matter which it is, although it's probably a mixture of both.
It's an obvious shortcut to benefit employers at the expense of Americans, so it should be terminated or severely curtailed.
There just can't be too many situations where a foreigner has specific skills/experience not held by an American.
> There just can't be too many situations where a foreigner has specific skills/experience not held by an American.
I generally agree, although I do feel compelled to defend that point. Just using my own career path as an example, people who are not deep in a particular field frequently cannot appreciate the nuances of expertise. Although, at the same time, cutting-edge world-class expertise is frequently less necessary than people believe.
Take me, for example. My job in 2017 required me to, by accident as a side effect of what I was doing, to become the world's expert in a particular software tool. I don't know exactly how you'd measure world expert, but I would bet money that in 2017, I was probably in the top ten worldwide of people with experience on this tool who were not paid to create it.
But, the particular thing I was using this expertise for was absolutely retarded. It was the kind of thing that sounded super cool to an engineer, but was absolutely retarded from a business perspective. I have a sneaking suspicion that my boss knew this, and to her, it was just free money from a banker to fuck around for a year doing something fun. So on the one hand, I, a non-American, was actually the world's expert in this thing. On the other hand, there was on economic merit to my expertise, so giving me a visa on the basis of that expertise would not have been rational. My only point is, this stuff is way more nuanced than people realize.
But in any case, I am not disagreeing with your general point, which if I understand it correctly, could be phrased as "we could deport all H1Bs tomorrow and everyting would be fine. Better maybe, even". As a non-American (Canada) who desperately wants to live in your country, I have a very personal interest in increasing H1Bs. But, I agree with you that it would be best for your country if you got rid of them.
Also, now that I think about it: if anything was about world class expertise, they wouldn't be talking about H1Bs, because the O1 visa exists. The O1 visa is the "extraordinary alien" visa, and it's given to people who are world class experts in whatever field, just because America doesn't want experts falling into enemy hands. So if anyone is ever saying they need H1Bs to get "world class" talent, or "the best", or anything like that, just ask them why they can't get O1s. There's no cap on O1s, either.
"The friction ICE is creating in society might not be worth it."
What friction? It's just the same idiot protestors that protest everything. They need to start throwing them in jail for years and you'll see how fast the "friction" ends.
better yet, throw who is funding them in prison.
We can't. Because... Bondi!
The media conveniently leaves out the fact that a good chunk of the citizenry are quietly pleased with ICE cleaning house, so to speak.
We can't end government benefits to illegals because neither party wants to. The left openly doesn't, the right says empty things about it but in reality does nothing.
One thing I think you need to understand is who is administering these programs on a day to day level. If an illegal walks into a benefits office in East L.A. or submits a paper or online request he's very likely dealing with a guy who 1) is very likely himself Hispanic 2) has some kind of extended family member or ancestor who was himself illegal 3) belongs to some kind of employee union which at a deep, intuitive level depends on government support and growing the size of government and 4) hates Trump.
Think that might affect how their request is handled?
I don't doubt it. A reasonable person would argue that these loopholes need to be found and stopped.
It's an active and ongoing drain on the US financial system.
To recognize it, talk about it and not address it is criminal.
1.6 million have self-deported so far in 2025, the dead man walking administration let so many in that this is way worse than clean up on aisle 6. 50 yr mtg madness but this clean up can work if continued unlike DOGE which should be a program that never ends. Get prepared. These types of things will make u find out who real friends are
They may end up offering 50 year mortgages but that doesn't mean many people will want one. Only the low information home buyer will likely get sucked into that one. And such people would also have the option of creating their own 15 or 20 year payoff plan and not end up actually keeping that mortgage for 50 years, and paying it off early.
The Pentagon as well...
I didn't even go there.
Stopping the Department of WAR from squandering tax dollars to mess with other countries would also be worthwhile.
The Pentagon is embarrassing. The entire political arena is embarrassing. Sadly, we the commoner pay the price.
Hid admin came out swinging with DOGE, which ended up just being a big show.
I don't think any bankrupt nation has ever evolved or policy changed back to prosperity. The success stories have been those that have completely, at least financially, collapsed and then rebuilt from scratch. Argentina is one such potential success story happening now. Germany and Japan. Panama post Noriega, etc. I hope that is not our trajectory but I fear it is.
Bessent is at his normal cadence. He speaks like this off camera too.
The play is owning real assets and converting paper equity wealth into non-dollar currencies to buy more real assets elsewhere. Hence crypto.
The plan is not to restore the economy to what it was whenever but to scavenge what exists and use that paper wealth elsewhere.
2x Trump voter here. Calling it as I see it; may be dead wrong!
> there is no case where subsidizing demand without increasing supply leads to better affordability.
It's been a long time since I've read his blog, but are you familiar with the writings of the economist Arnold Kling? This is basically his One Big Idea: almost every us government policy, in practice, involves subsidizing demand while restricting supply, and it predictably makes everything more expensive and doesn't ever fix anything ever.
(For one example, that I'm improvising so it might not be a great one: US policy regarding civic planning and zoning law artificially reduces housing density from market equilibrium, which drives up housing prices. The US responds by giving tax credits to home buyers, which subsidizes the price of housing but doesn't stop artificially reducing the density. The result is that housing is still scarce, but is now more expensive, because the people selling housing price in the tax credit since they know you'll get it)
He might state the argument too strongly, or too broadly, but, I am strongly aligned with his take
Sounds a lot like the Austrian School of economics. Every government action is like pushing on a wet bit of string. People adapt their behaviour accordingly and it ends up achieving nothing but making things worse by distorting markets.
But their promises all sound great, and who doesn't want "free" stuff?
I can't tell if you're accusing me of being Austrian economically to discredit me, or to agree with me. I wouldn't say I'm an Austrian economist, but I've definitely been accused of sympathizing with the Chicago school before.
In any case, your rephrasing there is more or less exactly what I'm saying. I agree with your comment, I just can't tell if it was sincere or sarcastic
I'm simply agreeing with you - no sarcasm or ambiguity intended. Just connecting some of the dots.
Gato - I always appreciate your insights though this time I'll nitpick:
a) with the permanent lien called "property taxes" no one truly owns their homes in the US
b) 30 year, 50 year matters, and yes $200+ matters on a monthly budget as it makes the difference between eating or not eating for many families, or a bit of entertainment if they were eating
c) few people hold a mortgage to maturity: they either refinance or make extra payments to pay it off sooner. Mortgage is based on "morte" or death... finance till death, or as Jason Hartman (big RE investor) is wont to say: Refi till ya die.
Or as the late Richard Russell used to write: Inflate or die.
Conclusion: Expect more inflation.
if you are within $200 a month of "eating vs not eating" then buying a home seems like a poor idea.
and refi-ing a 50 year mortgage might as well be taking out an I/O loan. you'll build no equity
Thanks for taking the time to respond (first time ever - sheds tear)
Some places it makes MUCH more sense to rent (ex: big Cali cities or coastal FL communities where you can rents for 20% of the monthly nut: $2M house for $6,000-8,000/month vs. Memphis $150K house for $1,200 month).
There are hundreds of RE markets. Some places are terrible to invest (cyclical markets) and others better (linear) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weOGoogEWK4
Memphis will go tend to go up slow and steady but the other property prices will gyrate wildly. Memphis will rent for almost 1% of purchase price whereas the FL house will rent for less than 0.5%.
I've done a lot of investing over the years. RE is a big challenge but building equity goes to the owner of homes in linear markets.
One can park his/her money in a bank at 3% interest and get crushed by inflation;
or s/he can buy crypto, gold, silver and try to tread water with inflation.
Wall Street is a den of thieves but I do know common people, widows, who've tripled, quadrupled their money and outsmarted the thieves. Good for them. That's not my game.
With hyperinflation it's going to be a good challenge for everyone to keep from drowning. In 40 years that payment will seem puny if the dollar even exists.
Thanks again for responding.
the key issue in home ownership is stability.
you need quite a lot for it to make sense, a mortgage is a large, highly leveraged, long term commitment and if you're living within on hiccup of not being able to pay it, it's a desperately bad bet.
we saw this in the 2008 home ownership cargo cult where the government mistook "being a homeowner" for "being middle class." it's not like that. it runs the other way. you reach a level of income and stability and you become a homeowner.
if you lack this, taking on a mortgage is a financial death trap.
100% Gato.
Marry the property, date the rate.
Many people cannot budget or delay gratification.
The 2004-2007 "NINJA" loans were pure fraud with the loan originators participating fully in order to skim the up-front commission and walk away as the loans were sliced into tranches and their debts rehypothecated.
This is exactly right. If 200 2025 dollars a month is the difference between a 30 year mortgage and renting for you, you need to rent. If all you have is 2400 dollars extra a year, the first major maintenance requirement your home needs will break you and/or put you deeper into debt that will only get deeper.
If you get paid 26x a year, one check should fully cover your housing with T&I. this shakes out to roughly the old rule of thumb that housing should be 30% of your gross income, or don't buy a house for more than 3x your salary.
200 extra dollars a month should not make the difference in a decision like this.
Prices are always set on the margin.
The rates are not permanent; instead, they change daily.
People can (and do) take advantage of refinancing and using different lending products, like velocity lending, that can put you ahead of the game. It takes planning and discipline.
Some people arbitrage by renting in overpriced cyclical markets and being landowners in underpriced linear markets.
The mortgage is fixed, so starting with $200/month extra can turn into $300, then $400 and $500 (as it has for us, repeatedly) through financing.
Years ago my friend sat on his hands as he was waiting for the "big crash" rather than buying. OK. He's still on the sideline years later. Ironically, Hartman just talked about this 5 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AOZ52jzDKs
A great source for learning about RE is Jason Hartman.
Where I live mortgages are often substantially cheaper than rent for similar properties. If you have pets there are often times when there are no properties at all of any price available for rent. Even without pets your options are often limited to really crappy houses for rent or wildly overpriced apartments. A mortgage payment on a small home right now is half what many of the apartments cost.
Another excellent point, doctor: Many landlords will lose their insurance coverage if the tenants own fighting dogs.
Around here that’s a non-existent problem. The reason around here that people don’t rent to pet owners is because pets tend to be destructive to homes and renting pet owners tend to be irresponsible. Cats get sick and urinate on carpets which may get superficially but not deep cleaned. Dogs chew up stuff and destroy the grass with their urine and feces.
Most potential tenants are pet owners
Some lie and sneak in pets
Some have pets and are meticulous about keeping clean
Some leave behind incredible destruction.
Pet rent plus monthly pet rent.
Building equity is one thing, but building a community and staying in one place (one school system) is another. You get to keep the upgrades, the paint scheme, the memories. Back to the 1% rule:
You can get a property (I'll go back to Memphis where you can STILL get a property for $70-100K and rent it for $700-$1,000 with a $550-$800 50-year mortgage) - you can own/live there or rent and come out ahead. You're at 1%.
Linear market, house purchase makes sense.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3362-Carrington-Rd-Memphis-TN-38111/42197000_zpid/ (just a super quick look - could probably knock $15K off the price and rent for $900 - it's just an example).
You can get a property in Sarasota, FL for $900,000 but only rent it for $5,000. You're at 0.55% https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10218-Morning-Mist-Ln-Sarasota-FL-34241/337169370_zpid/
Cyclical market (like NYC, Coastal California or Coastal Florida), purchasing may not make sense.
You could call this "arbitrage". Is there risk? Yes.
> “With middle and lower income consumers, they’re under a lot of pressure. If you’re upper income earning over $100k, things are good. Stock markets are near all time highs. You’re feeling, quite confident about things. You’re seeing international travel, all those barometers of upper income consumers are doing quite well. What we see with middle and lower income consumers is actually a different story.
There is an under-discussed factor in this: salary inflation over the past fifteen years. I don't know how significant this is, it might not matter.
I am a software engineer. Fifteen years ago, I made six figures, and the other white collar non-engineering professionals I worked with, like marketing or AMs or whatever, made like 50k
Now, I am a software engineer, I make six figures, and those jr. HR and marketing and AM employees are making 80-100k, because inflation. Software engineering salaries did go up, but not proportionally; where ten years ago we would be making 2x what those other professionals made, now we're making like 30% more.
All of this is to say, the quote from the mcdick's CEO could be overlooking the fact that a significantly larger number of white-collar Americans are making over $100k than ten years ago. $100k isn't that big of a number anymore.
My gut check is that there are a few trends:
* Inflation makes all numbers bigger while purchasing power decreases
* Tech opulence has made comfortable salaries _more_ accessible to lower skilled white collar workers
* Tech layoffs, on the other hand, have made corporate jobs less accessible in general.
I do not know where these various trends net out, it is clearly worse than ten years ago but I don't think just looking at it by current-year income like that tells the whole story.
The tariff payouts felt like a preemptive strike on SCOTUS to me, "now it will be your fault people don't get their checks" kind of message to get them to decide Trump is right about his powers in this area as the case arguments didn't seem favorable.
Betting markets are now overwhelmingly predicting the tariffs get tossed out. This will be good for inflation and longer term for Trump (saving him from himself). Oddly it will be the best case scenario, as Trump got other countries to lower their barriers, and now we will lower ours. Free trade will be a net benefit.
You can’t have a economy for wage and salary employees if all the jobs have been shipped overseas and the remaining service jobs are filled by imported third worlders. If you have a solution that doesn’t involve tariffs let’s hear it, but the current system has been in place since the ‘80s at least and nobody has done jack to alter the trajectory of domestic job destruction.
The current system has led to
1) The highest living standards of any large country since the advent of agriculture ten thousand years ago.
2) Higher growth rates and lower unemployment for the past thirty years than other developed countries (such as Europe and Japan)
3) Greater reduction in global poverty than ever before, enriching billions of lives.
As I said in my initial comment I am not arguing for open borders. If I was to lay out an economic plan it would be off topic. I can do so if you really want me to, but it would involve no tariffs, millions of hard working English speaking legal immigrants, lower welfare payments, lower government regulation, and outsourcing (where economic) of lower skilled manufacturing to lower skilled countries. We should focus on skilled labor, entrepreneurial ideas and capital and a healthy service economy (where most jobs have actually been for developed nations for the past 75 years).
"Free trade"?! Since when? Say something like NEVER.
Great insight, TY
The interesting thing to me about the first Manufacturing graph is the wild swings that took place between Jan 2020-Jul2023. I think every economist's use of that span as some kind of data point should be attributed with an asterisk. Due to the pandemic, manufacturing went from "normal" to negative, then way overdone due to companies retooling to make ventilators. I was part of the electronic component shortage for two years where we couldn't supply enough product so cars left the plant without some onboard components. It was an insane time that shouldn't be used as a baseline for anything.
best not to shut down the world for a respiratory virus next time
The unsustainable national debt was nearly $37 Trillion dollars when Trump was inaugurated and had surpassed the GDP in 2022.
Now, since the BBB included 1 trillion dollars for the Department of Offense (War), the national debt is over 38 trillion dollars and further surpassing the GDP until one day in the near future when the natural consequenses of such irresponsible spending blows it up completely: https://lizlasorte.substack.com/p/americas-debt-clock-keeps-going-higher?r=76q58
I think Don is probably in over his head on this one, as you said. This AI crap is going to burst at some point, I think people are getting fed up with it. AI is great for certain applications, but trying to jam it into everything is just fucking annoying at this point.
“there is no case where subsidizing demand without increasing supply leads to better affordability.” 100%. Channeling Dr. Sowell.