Sunday, April 1, 2012

Property, Paycheck or Pension

If your well being is tied to any of the three, you are a sitting duck.  The powers that be are consolidating their ability to flexibly apply violence on those who resist having what is theirs tapped to bail out the banksters.  Note the false dilemma presented by the Irish leader in this article: this tax or disaster.

There is an alternative: repudiate the debt, and watch prices of everything begin to fall.  We are in this problem for reasons relating to actions which caused prices to rise.  proof of the policies undoing the damage will be falling prices.

Recall: At 9% interest, circa 1990, he who could afford a $200,000 home could also afford at 6% a $300,000 home. The month payment is the same, the income to the bank is the same.  By 2000, interest rates were in fact 6%. Did people then buy $300,000 homes? No, people paid $300,000 for $200,000 homes.  This is how home prices rose so quickly.

This was not accidental.  With the dotcom bust inevitable, Greenspan had armies of economists fan out across USA to figure out how to inflate the economy.  It was decided housing would do the trick.  Hence falling interest rates.  Party on.

Presently, the last bubble, is the stock market.  Kiss that pension good bye.

Observe:  Lowering interest and expanding the (putative) money supply caused house prices to rise.  Cheap money allowed governments to borrow wildly, and raise taxes to cover the bond obligations.  property taxes poured in and no one cared because property values skyrocketed.

Now property values are sinking, but the bond obligations stay steady.  Fiscal constraints abound.  Working people can give up more (the loss is being made up in food and gas prices for now, and cutting back on services such as police and fire) or the bonds can be repudiated.  Teach the lenders a lesson.  Will our credit be shot?  No!  When we owe nothing, and can make payments, our credit is excellent.  Or better yet, once free, stop borrowing.

We can also take this opportunity to adjust the wild excesses in our social services.  It is a little gurded secret that the welfare rolls are gorged with fraudsters.  And where else in the world can you get a truck load of millionaires to show up at a fire with one phone call?  70% of out firefighters are volunteers in USA, each every bit as trained and capable as their welfare-queen counterparts in the city.

We have learned since Katrina in a disaster we are on our own.  FEMA exists for FEMA, just as TSA exists for TSA.  Let's get rid of 911 and sort out being on our own without the disaster to make the transition so much harder.

Another alternative is to have prices fall so low in say housing that the taxes obligated are in fact met.  Say your typical home needs to generate $500 per month in taxes to cover current obligations.  And the typical homeowner can afford to pay $900 month for the typical home.  Then house prices need to fall to the point where mortgage payments are typically $400, so that the taxes of $500 are affordable.  This way we need not inconvenience the welfare queen firefighters. But it does stick it to the banks, which gores the powers that be.

The damage was done during the boom years.  The bust is simply the time where "who pays?' for the damage is decided.  The decision is working people will pay, both in takings and denyings. Working people are having their paychecks, property and pensions tapped, and at the same time being denied the new and better that would be coming to market if paychecks pensions and property were not being tapped to enrich the very few.

This is the big loss, what we do not see: newer and better of everything in medicine, religion, education, housing, entertainment.  We cannot effect change through the state, since election fraud is material.

The only hope is to fight the good fight and start a business.  And in starting a business, you are rather obliged to go through a personal transformation.


0 comments: