No, DeSantis isn't "winning" against Walt Disney World

Last night I ate the scraps of chili out of the can that Gonch put in the dumpster.

I consider myself EXTREMELY lucky!

Please tell me you at least dipped a day old chicken tender in it.

Lord Gonchar:

Yesterday, I ate chili out of a can.

Whose can?

Hormel's.

(my neighbor Steve Hormel, this can is just for illustrative purposes)

TheMillenniumRider:

Must be nice, I looked at homes, mortgage costs more than rent

That must be regional, because it wasn't true ten years ago when I moved here, and it's not true now. I was here a week before I put money down to build a house, and my mortgage was $300 less. That house now rents for $3250, which is $800 more than my mortgage for a house that's 40% larger.

And regarding the earlier comment about the stock market... I don't understand the sentiment that it's some mysterious thing that you need a secret handshake to access. Anyone can open an IRA. Most of the brokerages even have automatic investing options with no minimum. So you skip a couple of burritos a month. You don't need a corporate 401k or investment knowledge. You buy index funds and never touch them. And behold, you make money.

And regarding Occupy, comparing that to #MeToo or BLM is insulting to those movements. #MeToo was started on large part by specific, identifiable actresses and film workers, and exposed by journalists. That's how it got organized. BLM is an actual organization with a hierarchy and executives, and became a thing because of specific victims whose names we know. Who led Occupy? What did it actually change?

I think this covers what I think.

Orlando median rent: $2,118. Median home price: $390K. That's a price-to-rent ratio of 15.3, which is just over the "better to buy" line of 15 but well under the "better to rent" line of 21. The mortgage might be higher than rent, especially at 6.5%, but because the mortgage includes equity (both market gains and payments) it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

sirloindude:

Home insurance costs

What brought be back to the thread was this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/202...hange.html

"Opinion: Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable" (That might be paywalled. Short version: California meddles too much and makes it impossible to price insurance for current costs; Florida is too hands off and makes fraud easy.)

djDaemon:

Strong "we're all trying to find the guy who did this" vibes.

That is the Greg Abbott strategy in Texas. He ran for a third term, yes third, on the campaign promise of "fixing" schools with a voucher system and giving property tax relief after Republicans have been running every facet of state government for nearly a quarter century with him as the governor for 8 of those years. The biggest problem with the property taxes and schools is that Republicans have been hording a nearly $200 billion surplus for more than a decade for a "rainy day". Every time he talks about fixing things, I want to scream, "you did this!"

Yeah, well, Tallahassee is too busy making sure that kids learn that slaves learned useful skills that benefited them.

Jeff:

That must be regional, because it wasn't true ten years ago when I moved here, and it's not true now

Could very well be a regional thing. Currently the house I am in is a bit over 2k for rent. It was sold in 2016 for 270k. It is currently valued somewhere between 450-500k. So in less than 10 years the value nearly doubled. Have wages doubled in the past ten years? How about an extra 50%, 25%? For some people that is the case, but for most it is not. If the house was below 300k I could buy no issue, but at near half a million with 6% or more interest, never going to happen.

"Vouchers" and "school choice" is code for privatizing public education. There is no evidence that voucher programs or charter schools work compared to traditional public schools. They certainly cut costs but that is largely at the expense of students with IEPs and 504 plans.

The situation in Florida is especially troubling. I'm surprised they aren't forcing teachers to say that slaves were happy. Add to that the hissy fit DeSantis threw about AP African American studies. Now they may have issues with AP Literature since some books on the list could be considered sexually explicit and therefore banned under HB1069.

The voucher proposal in Texas was so bad that rural Republicans derailed it and, since it was attached to every education budget bill, it sank much needed pay increases for teachers. The voucher amount was small enough that it would only help people that could already afford school choice through private schools or buying homes in highly rated districts. Abbott keeps threatening to call legislative special sessions until it passes.

Jeff:

That must be regional, because it wasn't true ten years ago when I moved here, and it's not true now.

Yeah, I think there may be some areas here and there with rents still based on 3-4% mortgages, and possibly invert rent/mortgage ratio, but they'll dry up. Rents will generally want to settle on mortgage + insurance + maintenance + profit costs for a given area, so almost always more expensive than mortgage/tax/ins alone.

TheMillenniumRider:

So in less than 10 years the value nearly doubled. Have wages doubled in the past ten years?

You're making a strawman argument to the wrong guy. I bought my first house in 2001, and tried to sell it in 2009, and then finally could unload it in 2013. I got out with zero equity. Home value is insanely erratic. In the last year, the comps in my neighborhood have swung 15%.

And I get it, housing costs are problematic. But rich people didn't cause that problem, supply and demand did.

Actually other homeowners caused the housing shortage NIBYs blocking apartment and multi family homes to be built everywhere for fear home values would drop. Some of them are rich, some of them are old, but most of them are middle class.

The rich can't be "the 1%" and a lot. Just saying. It's not just apartments that are in short supply, and that's why single-family is also up in price. Also, you're wrong, as apartment construction reached a 50-year high last year. It has been on the rise for more than a decade. Come on, man, you had to know you were gonna get fact-checked around here.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03...pply-chain

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/202...index.html

https://www.bankrate.com/re...#inventory

They all say that multilevel home building need to increase. 50 year high for apartment growth? That takes us back to 1970s. America has been not building enough multi family homes since WWII. The percentage of housing that is single family in this country is 77%. That’s still way too high.

Until a few years ago, Ann Arbor politics was dominated by the BANANA caucus.

Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

The YIMBY slate now has a supermajority, which has relaxed the zoning restrictions quite a bit and smoothed the approval process somewhat. That hasn’t turned into a tone of housing yet, but hope springs eternal.

Naturally, many of my been-here-decades neighbors are pearl-clutching at “the loss of neighborhood character,” which is barely disguised code for “marginal property values.”

Effective tax rates are much more important than marginal tax rates. You could have a marginal tax rate of 150% and pay less than what you pay now (depending on how taxable income is determined). No one paid the 91% or 70% top marginal rates when they existed. There was an entire cottage industry that created tax shelters which allowed people to avoid paying effective tax rates anywhere near the 91% or 70%. Those tax shelters have largely been removed as options with changes to the tax code. Reality that many people with agendas (such as Paul Krugman) ignore.

Baby boom at the end of WWII fueled a consumer based economy. US was able to take advantage of that given our economy was unscathed by the war and those in Europe and Asia had to be re-built. Not the case today. And capital is much more mobile and the world much more interconnected.

"Fair share" gets tossed around a lot when people talk about taxes. How much is "fair" and what makes it so? What is your view on corporate tax rates?

On a long term basis, rent needs to cover the cost of home/residence ownership. And allow for some type of profit for the landlord. If it doesn't, your landlord will be bankrupt eventually.

More than a decade of record low mortgage interest rates (even today, rates are low on a historical basis -- in 1980s, they approached 20%) helped fuel run up in prices. There are also supply and demand issues that cause more significant pricing issues in certain parts of the country.

There are structural/cultural issues that feed disparities in income. Back 30 years ago when I started, it was common to see attorneys married to secretaries. Now that is sexual harassment. In addition, many spouses of attorneys stayed home to raise kids. Today, most of our young attorneys are married to other attorneys and both are working (including those with kids). People are marrying later (those who marry in any event). More likely that college grads will marry college grads. Those with grad degrees will marry others with grad degrees. Even engineers are more likely to marry engineers, social workers more likely to marry social workers, etc.

Most of our most pressing issues are complicated. You can't point to one issue as the sole cause. Its multiple factors. But often we see people who think if something isn't the sole cause, its not a cause at all. And a lot of people who don't have an interest in talking about anything if it takes more than 2-3 minutes. Can't happen if you want to discuss/solve/improve our most pressing issues.

That post made my nipples WAY harder than it should have.

Jeff:

You're making a strawman argument to the wrong guy. I bought my first house in 2001, and tried to sell it in 2009, and then finally could unload it in 2013.

To be fair, 2009 was about the worst time to sell, massive pothole in the market post-recession. Being in NE Ohio didn't help, that's not really a strong growth area. It's a bummer you had to move at that time.