The Housing Bubble

Or detains, harrasses, and abuses them (in this case with Tasers) at un-Constututional but perfectly legal checkpoints.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/05/17/what-the-fk-is-wrong-with-you/

My two teenagers were at Silverwood Theme Park yesterday, got soaked in a downpour, marched in their school’s band at the Spokane Lilac Festival and arrived home at 0200-hrs in the morning. Both are still sleeping.

Summer has got to be better for him than winter was. With only 16% of normal snowpack, his private ski resort undoubtedly left a lot to be desired.

Fairfield, CA

“’We couldn’t find a hotel in the neighborhood, and there weren’t really any downtown,’ says Jason Roberts, founder of Better Block. ‘There was only one’.”

And just why is that?

“At the same time, we saw a city report saying the population is decreasing and there’s this excess housing stock—there’s less tax revenue to take care of our existing infrastructure, but it will also bring down neighborhoods pretty quickly.”

“… bring down neighborhoods pretty quickly.”

If a neighborhood is going to be brought down rather quickly then there is little incentive for anyone to build a hotel. And no hotel means no place to stay.

‘Six years after the foreclosure crisis started, nearly 18 million houses are sitting vacant in the U.S. Could some find new life as Airbnb businesses?’

Sounds expensive. Who is going to maintain the moldy three-bedroom foreclosure motels?

“We couldn’t find a hotel in the neighborhood, and there weren’t really any downtown,” says Jason Roberts, founder of Better Block.”

Haha… a budding limousine liberal spreads his wings.

Or maybe some boxes?

ROTFLMAO!

Good point. Sounds like they have chosen a cyclical pattern of buying at the peak, only to lose the full value of their real estate investment to foreclosure in the next bust, after which they again buy high. This is a hopeless long-term wealth accumulation strategy, unless perhaps if they use HELOC funding to purchase stocks and other assets before defaulting.

It’s far more practical to buy in a trough, and sell at the peak or never. But timing is difficult given the unpredictability of central bank intervention to reflate housing.

‘Govt program’ is a tax bill that Congress passes near the end of every year exempting that 1099 from taxation for primary residences.

There are other exceptions as well.

I forgot about the other long-term wealth accumulation strategy of buying at the peak, stopping payments during the subsequent recession, and living rent-free for five or more years during the bust. I’m not clever enough to execute this wealth accumulation strategy.

So in the end it all works out for some people.

The sheeple sanctioned this lunacy with their votes for Bush, Obama, McCain, and Romney, with HillaryJeb poised to take it to a whole new level. If you like your crony capitalism, you can keep your crony capitalism.

“For some, electricity is becoming a luxury item.”

NY Times puts green lipstick on a pig

By Charles Battig
May 12, 2015

Columnist Thomas Friedman has won three Pulitzer Prizes. His editorial skills are in full display in his May 6, 2015 New York Times article “Germany, the Green Superpower.” He seems anxious to share his Nobel Prize experiences by awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Germany for their “energy transformation” program and for what he sees as a resultant “stability of our planet and climate.” A true literary professional, he knows how to put the proverbial “lipstick on a pig” and make it seem like a genuine thing of beauty.

Friedman neglected to mention that 15,000 coal miners took to the streets of Berlin to protest over potential job losses. This in the same week he was entranced by the German green-energy wonder.

Friedman claims that Energiewende “was to create demand that would drive down the cost of solar and wind to make them mainstream, affordable options. And, in that, the Energiewende has been an undiluted success.” Tell that to the German consumers now paying the highest electricity prices in Europe. For some, electricity is becoming a luxury item. Unable to pay electricity rates over twice the price of ours, 800,000 poor Germans have had their power cut off. Manufacturing plants are leaving Germany for other countries in search of cheaper and more stable electric energy.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/05/ny_times_puts_green_lipstick_on_a_pig.html#ixzz3aP6tSaIT
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Over ice is the area is increasing not increasing, I have posted the data many times.

“The study predicts that what remains of the once-prominent ice shelf, a thick floating platform of ice, most likely will “disintegrate completely” before the end of this decade.”

“floating”

If the ice is floating then it is already displacing it volume of water and hence its melting will not make the seal level rise.

Ice that is 10,000 years old is pretty rancid.

Time to start anew.

If you get tired of the politics regarding the climate and want to understand the science of climate then here’s an excellent place to go:

http://forecast.uchicago.edu/lectures.html

And here’s another excellent place to go:

http://scienceofdoom.com/

IMHO. FWIW.

Here, let me use it in sentence form for some context:

“A venal and corrupt .1% in the financial sector can count on the useful idiots in the US electorate who vote overwhelmingly for oligarch-annointed Republicrat candidates who will perpetuate the crony-capitalist status quo, at the expense of the 99 percent.”

The CAGW seems to be getting quite upset that they get their butts kicked on this issue every time they raise it. You think they would learn but the inability to learn is why the vast majority of them will be voting for Hillary in the next election cycle. “We won’t get fooled again” is a lyric that they did not learn.

Denton county, North of dallas, voted to ban franking last year, I.e. no drilling permits.

The republican dominated state lege passed a law this year prohibiting counties from restricting drilling activities.

So much for ’small govt’ and ‘local control’.

It is no coincidence that the AGW crowd has wanted to shutdown both the scientific and political debate on this issue around the same time the data turned against. While correlation does not prove causation, from 1979-1998 it was easy to argue that co2 was causing a warming, however since 1998 to now the correlation has totally broken down since temperatures are stable to down despite soaring levels of co2 in the atmosphere, so as e-mails have demonstrated, the have attempted to prevent scientific studies from being published, they have refused to debate AGW skeptics, newspaper’s have even refused to even allow comments against AGW. The AGW crowd has even called for critics to be jailed. Hardly science or even the actions of people that believe that the facts are on their side.

There’s always talk from the ADAN team about how all the scientists are in it for the money.

Compare market cap of all oil,gas, coal companies to all alternative energy companies and then get back to us. Even the recent crash their market cap and money dwarfs alternative energy.

Gov is also controlled by those with the most money as the Texas GOP taking away local control demonstrates.

drugs rock and roll and surprisingly good teeth

In the immortal words of Al Bundy, “Let’s see ‘em build a better one of THOSE in Japan….”

Look at the part line on the blondes… err, brunettes. Gotta check out the wool if ‘ya want blonde.

Nice. Never enough of them!

The invisible hand is always right.

Ronald Reagan inherited the fall of the Shah and the rise of Islamic extremists throughout the region. As president you have to deal with the hand that was dealt. The key is whether you make it better or worse. Iraq had stabilized by the time Obama inherited it. However, the Arab Spring destabilized the entire region as I predicted it would in 2011. Obama and Hillary bragged about their role in Arab Spring when they thought it was promoting democracy in the region. Thus, Obama owns a major part of the disasters unfolding in both Syria and Iraq.

The corn-fed, red-state, pork-bellies are waiting for Jesus’ return… at ANY price.

Almost to a man, the oligarch-annointed GOP candidates are backing the “privatization” of social security, which translates into allowing their .1% puppetmasters to go on an unfettered looting spree of the last great reserve of wealth that still remains beyond their grasp. And I have little doubt that the sheeple will once again meekly bend over and grab their ankles on command, as they did on ‘08 and ‘12.

“Yet somehow one of the fixes…”

Think of it as a smoke screen for the 0.1% stealing from the 99.9% and it will make more sense.

I don’t doubt that a “jury of her peers” will be happy to award her the payout to stick it to The Man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjPsxhsLouw&spfreload=10

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree on that one. If every “victim” of not watching where they’re going is allowed to sue to city for multimillion dollar damages, awarded by a “jury of their peers,” these already insolvent Democrat-run urban centers are going to be circling the drain even faster.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3085287/Al-Sharpton-s-daughter-sues-New-York-5-million-sprained-ankle.html

Why? Seems like it would set a very bad precedent…

Prolly more accurate to say demand is collapsing because the record number of ‘Muricans (93 million plus) who are “no longer in the labor force” (despite the fake BLS unemployment figures) can’t afford to spend much of their meager income or dwindling savings.

Welcome to the Obama-Fed-Goldman Sachs economic “recovery” that has massively enriched Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

I’m picking up a lot more stuff at yard sales, garage sales, and on Craigslist or E-Bay. People are starting to divest themselves of stuff they’ve accumulated and no longer need, or their changed economic circumstances are dictating that they downsize.

currency debasement everyone is trying to print money to solve problems.

Tax-free debt
The great distortion
Subsidies that make borrowing irresistible need to be phased out
May 16th 2015 | From the print edition
Timekeeper

THE way that black holes bend light’s path through space cannot be smoothed out by human ingenuity. By contrast, a vast distortion in the world economy is wholly man-made. It is the subsidy that governments give to debt. Half the rich world’s governments allow their citizens to deduct the interest payments on mortgages from their taxable income; almost all countries allow firms to write off payments on their borrowing against taxable earnings. It sounds prosaic, but the cost—and the harm—is immense.

In 2007, before the financial crisis led to the slashing of interest rates, the annual value of the forgone tax revenues in Europe was around 3% of GDP—or $510 billion—and in America almost 5% of GDP—or $725 billion (see Briefing). That means governments on both sides of the Atlantic were spending more on cheapening the cost of debt than on defence. Even today, with interest rates close to zero, America’s debt subsidies cost the federal government over 2% of GDP—as much as it spends on all its policies to help the poor.

This hardly begins to capture the full damage, which is aggravated by the behaviour the tax breaks encourage. People borrow more to buy property than they otherwise would, raising house prices and encouraging over-investment in real estate instead of in assets that create wealth. The tax benefits are largely reaped by the rich, worsening inequality. Corporate financial decisions are motivated by maximising the tax relief on debt instead of the needs of the underlying business.

Debt has many wonderful qualities—allowing firms to invest and individuals to benefit today from tomorrow’s income. But the tax subsidies have tilted the economy in a woeful direction. They have created a financial system that is prone to crises and biased against productive investment; they have reduced economic growth and worsened inequality. They are a man-made distortion and they need to be fixed.

Debt and taxes, life’s certainties

Start with the fragility. Economies biased towards debt are more prone to crises, because debt imposes a rigid obligation to repay on vulnerable borrowers, whereas equity is expressly designed to spread losses onto investors. Firms without significant equity buffers are more likely to go broke, banks more likely to topple (see Free Exchange). The dotcom crash in 2000-02 caused losses to shareholdersworth $4 trillion and a mild recession. Leveraged global banks notched up losses of $2 trillion in 2007-10 and the world economy imploded. Financial regulators have already gone some way to redressing the balance from debt by forcing the banks to fund themselves with more equity. But the bias remains—in large part because of the subsidy for debt. Under a more neutral tax system, firms would sell more equity and carry less debt. Investors would have to get used to greater volatility; but as equity buffers got thicker, shareholders would be taking less risk.

A neutral tax system would also lead to more efficient choices by savers and lenders. Today 60% of bank lending in rich countries is for mortgages. Without a tax break, people would borrow less to buy houses and banks would lend less against property. Investment in new ideas and businesses that enhance productivity would become relatively more attractive, in turn boosting economic growth.

Removing the advantages that debt enjoys would also lead to a fairer system. Relief on mortgage payments is a subsidy that flows to people who need it least: studies show that the richest 20% of American households by income gain the most. Mortgages would become costlier. But new instruments would emerge to allow individuals to bridge the gap between current savings and future income that debt alone now closes—for example, shared-equity mortgages that divide the gains and losses from house-price movements between banks and homeowners.

Lenders and borrowers

If the arguments for getting rid of the debt distortion are overwhelming, the path to its elimination could hardly be more rocky. Politicians do not much like changes that will lower house prices. There is a big co-ordination problem: tax is a matter for national governments, and few countries will be prepared unilaterally to withdraw subsidies that might make them less appealing to footloose companies. In addition, vested interests will bleat loudly. Businesses that depend heavily on debt—banks, private-equity firms and the like—will be ready to spend some of the billions they gain from the tax subsidy on lobbying to defend it.

This argues for a staged approach. The place to start is the subsidies on residential mortgages. Not only do these subsidies increase financial fragility, they fail to achieve their purported goal of promoting home-ownership. The shares of people owning their own homes in America and Switzerland, two countries with vast subsidies, are 65% and 44% respectively—no more than in other advanced economies like Britain and Canada that offer no tax break. The wisest step would be to phase out tax relief gradually, as Britain did in the 1990s.
…

The “natives” have consistently voted for socialist and “center-right” (read: crony capitalist) administrations, proving they are devoid of values as well as sense. Much like our own electorate.

Hey Lola. Hows your webcam shows going. Profitable?

Pat Robertson has a pretty large consensus.

never will.

The Republicans perversely have the reputation of the party of fiscal conservatism, despite their poor track record. This is perhaps why the story of a Democratic governor running a surplus versus a Republican governor with a massive deficit seems interesting.

I believe Clinton I versus his immediate predecessors had a similar success story.

When I was in High School I worked at a midwestern resort, which shall remain nameless, where they had timeshares. The salesmen (and women - the latter being even more unscrupulous than the guys) would get together in the dining room after their sales and gloat about how badly they’d screwed over the marks who bought the time shares. It made quite an impression on me.

I can imagine certain oligarch-backed candidates laughing in smokey back rooms with their oligarch benefactors about how the rubes swallowed vapid slogans like “Hope and change we can believe in” and bought a bill of goods, too.

17 or 20k would pay for a lot of hotel rooms in areas a lot less boring than Scottsdale.

Happy to

The corporatist in chief is pushing a bill supported by the GOP that will give corporations and the elite control over nation states that makes this issue I posted look trivial. We can vote in who we want, pass laws if we like, but if those laws limit corporate profits you can expect them to be overturned in a court of globalists. It will continue to drive down wages.

The US has a mountain of natural resources, we had a lot of manufacturing, and we still have a lot of science and engineering. There is no reason we should have free trade with countries that are non democratic military dictatorships.

“I thought that if everyone was armed that wasn’t supposed to happen, that everyone would be “polite” or something like that.”

Nine motorcycle gang members were killed and numerous other people were injured in a confrontation involving up to 200 rival gang members — followed by a shootout with police — at a sports bar in Waco, Texas, that wanted the bikers there, police said Sunday.

Waco police Sgt. Patrick Swanton said “at least five different criminal motorcycle gangs” were at Twin Peaks Sports Bar and Grill, in the busy Central Texas Market Place less than a half-mile from University High School.

“It progressed very rapidly from hands and feet as weapons to chains,” he said. “My understanding is a club was involved, and knives were involved. Gunfire broke out on the part of the criminal biker gangs.”

Police, who had been expecting trouble, had been already deployed to the scene, which Swanton described as part recruiting event and partly gang members showing they were unafraid in other gangs’ territory. So when the rumble began shortly after noon 12:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m. ET), they were ready to move in.

The violence spilled out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, where, Swanton said, the bikers fired first at one another and then at the police.

“They started have shooting at our officers, and our officers returned fire, taking several of them down,” Swanton said. “I’m amazed at the number of rounds fired. I’m amazed we did not have innocent civilians killed or injured.”

Biker Battle Leaves at Least Nine Dead in Waco, Texas
NBC News

Swanton said that the gunplay was over in a “matter of seconds” and that a SWAT officer told him, “It was mass chaos.”

“Never had he seen anything like that,” Swanton said.

Eight people were killed at the scene, and a ninth died at a hospital, Swanton said, adding that 18 people were taken to hospitals with gunshot and knife wounds, some with both.

He said probably near 100 weapons — including brass knuckles, chains, clubs and firearms — were strewn across the crime scene.

Swanton refused to name the bikers gangs involved, saying he wouldn’t give “name recognition” to “criminal organizations.”

Dang those Baltimore police are on a tear!