Hey Hey, Ho Ho, private homeownership has got to go, says anti-American Commie UCLA professor in The Nation

California’s Fires Prove the American Dream Is Flammable

If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership:

[W]e need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes. ... The valorizing of homeownership and property rights results not only in increased exposure to climate-change-fueled fires, but also in our inadequate responses to them. ... This is the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, transmuted through the urban, petrochemical century. Cheap energy—both the monetary price of subsidized gasoline and the hidden costs of fossil fuels—and the idealization of individual homeownership have created the scorching landscapes we face today. Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned. ... Even with the threats of climate change and rampant fire looming, the ideals of the American dream that have been instilled for more than 150 years will be difficult to dispel. ... We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.

Merry Christmas: Your single family housing neighborhood is now banned by Democrats in Virginia and Oregon

Speaking of poor, Obama's new house cost $12 million, Jimmy Carter's is worth $200,000

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

Renting is basically flat under Trump so far, but owner occupied housing, the very definition of middle class, is up big, 3.4 million

owner occupied

renter occupied

In 2018 68% of Americans couldn't afford a vacation, a concert, a ball game or even dinner out and a movie

Here at home, we see the ever-widening gap in our wealthiest cities — New York, San Francisco, LA — which are suffering from homeless crises of epic proportions. Forty percent of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of emergency. Last year, 68 percent couldn’t afford a ­recreational activity — from a vacation to concerts to a professional sporting event to even dinner or a movie — for lack of funds.

This year, the Census Bureau reported that the gap between the rich and poor has hit its highest level in the 50-plus years since they began marking it. Adjusting for inflation, the average household income is the same as it was 20 years ago. The average American can’t afford to buy a house in 70 percent of the country.

More here.

The rising share of workers not making the average wage

Note that under Bill Clinton, many important things happened which were detrimental to the middle class:

Bill Clinton raised taxes shortly after taking office in 1993 even though he had run promising not to.

Part-time employment soared as a result. 

Borrowing from home equity lines also soared as the middle class struggled to maintain its lifestyle in the wake of the recent recession, reducing "owners' equity in real estate" dramatically.

And, of course, the percentage of Americans not making the raw average wage ballooned by 2.6 points under Clinton, and by 4.1 points total by 2018.  

The difference between a payroll population not making the raw average wage in 2018 at 63.3% vs. 67.4% is 6.87 million.

That's roughly equivalent to the number of homes lost to foreclosure in the housing debacle, which bottomed in the spring of 2012. The share not making the average wage first hit 67% that same year.

This history since 1990 is a picture of the middle class under pressure and actually shrinking.

The only good thing that can be said about it is that the trend is flat since 2015, not worsening.

Nobody wants to buy 1800 sq. ft. either in the Chicago burbs when the property taxes exceed $7,000, more than doubled from a decade ago

Podshare: The Soviet future of housing

Comrade Kaprugina to Yuri: "There was living space for thirteen families in this one house." 

Yuri: "Yes. Yes, this is a better arrangement, comrades . . . more just."

If this were a booming economy this wouldn't be happening to housing starts

Treasury bonds are the most expensive they have been in over sixty years

All "asset" classes are near-record expensive: bonds, stocks, gold, housing, college education, health insurance policies . . .. 

Cliff Asness, here:

So, the bottom line is, as measured by real bond yield, U.S. Treasury bonds are really frickin’ expensive. Measured by the slope of the yield curve they are really frickin’ expensive. But, measured by the average of these two simple variables, they are 60+ year just about record-low frickin’ expensive. This result is not caused by, but is certainly exacerbated by, the (perhaps) surprisingly uncorrelated nature of slope and real bond yield, thus making both so low and at the same time considerably more surprising.

10 years after Santelli's rant against Obama's proposed bailout of your neighbor's mortgage, National Review pretends it was about deficit spending

You will search in vain in this article for the word "mortgage".

If the Tea Party had been about any one thing, it was about the moral hazard of bailouts. A sizeable minority of the American people perceived that bailouts made them chumps, dutifully following the rules and accepting their obligations while bankrupt businesses and bankrupt homeowners did neither. 

By Brian Riedl, long-time research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the article illustrates better than anything how the interests of establishment conservatism co-opted the Tea Party movement in 2011, just as establishment Republicanism co-opted Trumpism in 2017.

"Let's steal this energy and make it about something else".

Every. Damn. Time. 

New Budget Deal Puts Final Nail in the Tea-Party Coffin:

Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats.

LOL POLITICO January 2016: Opponents of family deportations under Obama leaked raid info to WaPo

Obama administration kicks off family deportation raids:

 

Johnson said the batch of deportees were among immigrants who crossed the southern U.S. border illegally since May 2014. That's when the U.S. began experiencing a surge of families and unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Officials say such crossings decreased by early last year, but began to pick up again in recent months. ...

The proposals to increase deportations appear to have stirred some dissent within the Obama administration. Just before Christmas, unnamed "people familiar with the operation" disclosed the plans to the Washington Post — a highly unusual leak about planned law enforcement actions. ...

Both Earnest and Johnson said DHS remains focused on deporting "felons, not families" — a curious talking point given that families were the targets of the weekend sweep. ...

Democrats in Congress — which is currently in recess — have been mostly quiet on the raids.

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, GOP poll leader Donald Trump — whose candidacy has been characterized by hardline rhetoric against immigrants here illegally — took credit for the raids in his typical flair.

“Wow, because of the pressure put on by me, ICE TO LAUNCH LARGE SCALE DEPORTATION RAIDS,” Trump tweeted when news of the planned raids broke. “It's about time!”

The fact that Trump was proudly taking credit for the raids wasn’t lost on advocates, who used that point to draw comparisons between the real estate billionaire and Obama’s immigration policies."The president's actions are far more harmful than Trump's demagoguery,” said Pablo Alvarado, the executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “While Trump's dangerous rhetoric stigmatizes our loved ones, President Obama actually deports them.”

 

Nothing shows the impoverishment of the middle class better than the decline in owning your own home since the year 2000

The continuing crisis of housing bubble-itis

Housing prices in 2017 are overvalued north of 40%. The index commensurate with the pre-1993 period should be about 142 but is instead 203.

Adam Tooze notes US house prices relative to the rest of the world are low but still run ahead of Italy and Germany.

What would happen if 44 million German Americans and 17 million Italian Americans went back home looking for a bargain? 

Wow, WaPo's Glenn Kessler almost becomes Rush Limbaugh, doubts Bernie's $1 trillion bailout claim

If anything, Bernie underestimates the scope of the secret loans during the financial crisis ten years ago. The Freedom of Information Act inquiry which brought them to light went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ben Bernanke only relented at the last second.

Discount Window lending behind the scenes during the crisis period soared into the multi-trillions of dollars by the time it ended in 2010 while everyone was fixated on the shiny object known as TARP ($700 billion, about a tenth the size of the generally accepted figure of $7.7 trillion). That's probably why TARP was undertaken to be honest: Oh look! A deer!

The DW loans were made to all kinds of entities for whom normal lending had disappeared. In too many cases very questionable collateral was put up. The loans were ultra-cheap, at rates unavailable to homeowners defaulting on their comparatively much more expensive mortgages because they had lost their jobs. Many of the loans rolled over and over and over again for protracted periods to keep the entities from going under, while Bush & Co. and then Obama & Co. did nothing for Joe Six-pack. Many millions lost their homes while businesses which should have gone bankrupt did not.

Hard to believe this clueless so-called fact checker still has a job.

I 100% sympathize with this technically true observation, but at least 17 million of these 54 million not in labor force are in high school and college!

It would be SO much better for high schoolers and collegians if there were ZERO illegal and legal immigrants taking the jobs they need to finance their educations, but when I think labor force, I don't think people 16-24 even though they contribute a lot to the economy.

Go to school. Stay in school. Then work like hell, SAVE, INVEST, and enjoy the American dream while voting for immigration restrictionists.

George W. Bush abandoned free market principles to save banks and companies the free market was about to destroy, but hey, we can't have that! That's capitalism!

"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system" - George W. Bush

Meanwhile, millions of homeowners were destroyed, along with their jobs, their savings, and their hoped-for futures, never to return.

Updated link:

AOC can't hide her laughably grandiose, pie in the sky, Green New Deal FAQ Launch from the cloud, either

AOC probably got an "A" on this paper in college, lol.

 

LAUNCH: Thursday, February 7, at 8:30 AM.:

Move America to 100% clean and renewable energy

Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure. ASCE estimates this is $4.6 trillion at minimum.

Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources

Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency

Build charging stations everywhere

Build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary

Replace every combustion-engine vehicle

Retrofit every building in America

It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible

Protect right of all workers to unionize and organize

Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work

Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels 

Simply put, we don’t need to just stop doing some things we are doing (like using fossil fuels for energy needs); we also need to start doing new things (like overhauling whole industries or retrofitting all buildings to be energy efficient).

Ensure that all GND jobs are union jobs that pay prevailing wages and hire local

Create economic prosperity for all

Create millions of high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all

Clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment for all

Create affordable public transit available to all

Provide job training and education to all 

Provide high-quality health care, housing, economic security, and clean air, clean water, healthy food, and nature to all

[Free coffee and toilets 24/7 at Starbucks]  

AOC wants to rape and pillage the bedrock of American (white) wealth: housing

Ocasio-Cortez Compares America’s Past To Nazi Germany, Says US Should Pay Reparations Like They Did:

People think reparations is reparations for slavery, but really, economically speaking, reparations are for the damage done by the New Deal and redlining because that is where we saw a compounding of the existing inequity from the legacy of slavery, where we drew red lines around black communities. We said white communities will get home loans and they will get access to the basic bedrock of wealth in America and this will be your heirloom and we gave white America the heirloom that appreciated overtime — that people still benefit from today and we did not give to African-American and Mexican communities, Puerto Rican communities.