Sad But True

~ Clarissa

I want to disagree but he’s right. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote Republican because the alternative is much worse but still, the dude is right.

Published by Clarissa

12 thoughts on “Sad But True”

  1. He’s right though.

    The biggest issue in our personal lives right now is the housing crisis. And as far as I know there is not anybody running for office anywhere who will even talk about it.

    But we still have to move next month, and we are gonna be hammered into the ground no matter what we do. If we don’t take the new job, and stay in our current place, the rent goes up. We’re already excavating our savings a little to afford it. Moving… every house in our price range, no matter how dingy, and how desperately it needs repairs, we are competing with real estate investors for it. The list price is more than what the place is worth. We put in an offer, and then we find out that it’s had NINE other offers, all of them over asking. The house eventually sells for $50k more than the list price– completely out of our range.

    I would vote for anybody running for office on a platform of real estate investing reform including but not limited to:
    1) No land ownership in the US without citizenship
    2) Limit to how much land any one person can own (how much? I don’t know. Let’s have that debate)
    3) Even stricter limits to how much land a business or corporation can own.
    4) Limits to absentee land ownership.
    5) Lending reform

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    2. I’m 100% with you. I’ve seen this back in Canada when normal people were completely squeezed out of the real estate market in Vancouver and Toronto. It’s a bloody shame. And now it’s coming everywhere. Like you, I want to vote for a candidate who will talk about this, who’ll propose solutions. But it’s not even mentioned. It’s THE issue of our times, absolutely crucial. And everybody pretends it doesn’t exist. Makes me so angry.

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      1. Don’t you get it? No politician can or will solve this issue because nothing short of a revolution will. That’s why they don’t mention it.

        THE issue of our times is financial inequality. The real estate market is where it’s felt the most acutely.

        methylethyl, what you’re proposing is less freedom and more regulation. It doesn’t seem like the party you vote for will go for that.

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            1. Yeah. But also, I’m registered independent. I vote mostly republican, but have also voted Democrat, green, libertarian, constitution and other minor parties. It’s not like any of the existing parties align with what I really want, I usually have to pick one issue that matters and roll with that. Or vote to re-elect anyone who’s actually responsive to his or her constituency. On the local level particularly, this makes a huge difference.

              These days it’s true I would not vote Democrat without a gun to my head. They have lost their everlovin minds, and even Tulsi, whom I want to like, is a WEF grad and can’t be trusted.

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        3. Just like in agriculture, what we really need is regulations that only apply to the biggest operators (i.e. Tyson, Cargill, et al), so that the smaller operators are more free and less encumbered– the larger your operation becomes, the more regulation you should face– because large operations concentrate risk. If I have five hens on my half-acre homestead and I sell the extra eggs to people at church, there should be no regulation that can touch me. If my eggs give someone salmonella, the damage is extremely limited. If I dispose of my hens’ waste improperly, the worst that happens is a bad smell, right in my yard where I live. But any regulation at all would put me out of business. But if a farmer with a million chickens in giant chicken-houses gets it wrong, it can sicken many people at once. If he disposes of waste improperly, it can contaminate the groundwater, pollute nearby waterways, and make the entire neighborhood unlivable. Nobody wants to live near a chicken house. It is better for everyone if both production and risk are distributed broadly.

          If you are some guy who just wants to own the house he lives in, there should be virtually no encumbrances. If you’re some guy who has a side income from owning three rental houses, maybe you should deal with some very tiny level of encumbrance. If you, or your company, own hundreds of rental units, particularly if they make up a non-trivial portion of units in a particular area, you should face significant encumbrance. If you have accumulated 10% of all the rental properties in the whole country, your corporation should be stripped of its legal rights, its assets confiscated, and all properties auctioned off individually (no bundled lots). It shouldn’t even be possible for that to happen.

          Probably the simplest way to iron out all that, across industries is to stop endorsing the legal fiction that corporations are people. I’m just not sure it would be enough.

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            1. Maybe getting elected to office means you must agree not to be a lobbyist (prosecutable by asset forfeiture and jail time), and you can’t go work for anybody who contracts with the government, for…. 5-10 years? I believe DeSantis is in the midst of trying to put something like that through in FL. All I can say is: Go DeSantis, go! I’m sure there are still loopholes– it would be hard to enforce a ban on going to work for, say, a company that convinced you to write legislation in a way that benefits them while you were in office.

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      2. Oh, and I’ll add:
        6) Using the monopoly hammer on Blackrock/Vanguard/etc. All together, these interlocking companies own between 10-15% of rental properties and mortgages nationally. That makes them far too powerful.

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