Today's quote comes from Charles Dickens:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
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U.S. Housing is dead, and it ain't never coming back. Aside from Oil, the reason for its absolutely, positively sure thing ongoing demise? Property taxes.
Property taxes were the vehicle for government extraction of any gains one might have had in their house during the housing boom. The boom is gone, but the property tax remains... and its like a chronic disease... home owners cannot get rid of it. In most locals (not Cal, but they screwed themselves anyway), these property taxes were the means with which local politicians paid for the votes of the public employees through their unions. These liabilities are never ending. Property taxes have been combined with the lessons learned by people regarding debt and not saving to doom housing for a generation.
Yes, people need a place to live. "A place to live" is a far cry from the mal-investment that housing has become over the past 30 years. Housing will be redefined very brutally over the next 20 years.
Stay clear of home builders and regional and small banks. Any reported improvement in housing will prove to be a mirage. But there will be reports. Propaganda never sleeps. Those that benefit from enslaving you via property taxes will not die without a fight. They will endeavor to place you in debt (what do you think QE2 is all about? An attempt to lure you into enslavement with cheap and easy terms... but once you sign on the dotted line the monster shows himself) by any means necessary. Young folks! Don't fall for it! Old folks, help keep your young from enslavement.
Oh, and by the way... Employer provided health insurance? Just another vehicle of enslavement. Anybody thinks the Obamacare helped them has rocks rolling around their head... then again, anybody who believes Obamacare will help them is likely incapable of grasping anything I have proposed here.
(I was watching a clip on Yahoo finance with James Altucher. All my life I felt that corporations were behind home ownership for the purpose of creating a barrier to moving, leaving the homeowner/employee stuck, toiling forever in some factory or mining town, unable to move easily to take advantage of new opportunities... most people thought I was nutty ("its the American dream"). And then Altucher, unprodded and out of nowhere and hardly germane to the conversation at hand expresses the same sentiments! Vindication! Shortly there after, Coal Guy makes a comment about the "company store" in the mining towns... think about it... the "company bank" lends the worker his mortgage, the company store sells him all his consumer stuff, and the property taxes finish him off. After a life time of enslavement, what exactly does this poor sot have to show for all his efforts? Not a f*&^ing thing. Is my absolute disdain and hatred for this system showing through yet? Perhaps its my working-class-self-educated-white-trash underbelly showing.)
More soon.