Our Really Lousy Housing Market

Mark Noonan25 Comments

From Zero Hedge:

In its schizophrenic manner, the media across the country lamented the housing-starts numbers, which were ugly: 571,000 annualized in August, down 5% from July, down 5.8% from August 2010, and down 75% from its peak of 2.3 million in January 2006. But for the housing market to heal, that number should be near zero for years.

18 million vacant units, that’s the problem. While some people dispute that number, everyone agrees that the inventory of vacant units is huge. Whether it’s 18 million or 12 million doesn’t change the problem. It only changes the duration of the healing process. This is the hangover from the housing bubble when the industry built millions of units for speculators who never had any intention of living there. And now, no one lives there…

Believe it or not, even out here in Las Vegas some new homes continue to be built – and I can’t see why.  To be sure, if someone actually came up to a home builder and specifically ordered a new home built, I could see that.  But we’re actually arguing right now over whether a developer should be able to start a new, high-end housing development near Red Rock canyon (I’m forthrightly opposed…first off, because we don’t need additional housing in the metropolitan Las Vegas area, secondly because I don’t want to see the Red Rock area marred by another round of cookie cutter houses…and if you do come to visit Las Vegas, do head out to Red Rock; you’ll not be disappointed and its not a long drive…you can even go horseback riding out there).  That aside, the article is right – we should be building zero new homes…now and for  many years.  We’re already glutted…and now that the courts have ok’d it, the banks are about to proceed with another very large round of foreclosures.  The problem will get massively worse before it ever gets better.

As for what to do with all the construction workers – my best idea for them is to shift them over to manufacturing, farming and mining…and, of course, whatever related construction will be necessary for an expansion of those industries.  We simply do not need houses…not only are we over-built but we’re running out of people to put in the houses, anyways.  The Boomers are retiring and, if anything, downsizing their housing…the follow-on generations are much smaller.  The idea that housing will be a core component of American wealth creation is over with  – it won’t be, not for another 50 years, and even then only if we throttle the Culture of Death and start having children again. There will always be a need for some home construction, of course…houses do deteriorate over time, but we’ll not need as much home construction as before.  And perhaps our home builders instead of throwing up cracker box houses can work on building houses designed to last a century with no major repairs?  More brick and stone, less drywall and stucco-over-chicken wire?  Housing which uses wind and solar to provide some  of their own electricity?  Houses that dispose of more of their own waste?  Maybe houses with bigger lots and built to make a neighborhood look normal rather than manufactured?  Just a thought…

A complete re-working of our economy will be necessary in order for full recovery to occur.  As I’ve endlessly harped upon – Making, Mining and Growing things.  We can’t live on home construction, auto manufacturing will never be as premier as it once was…and the cool, electronic gadgets are nice (and we should strive to lead the world in this area) but they can’t provide the literal tens of millions of jobs we’re going to need.  Only getting out there in to factories to make our own mundane items – clothes, tools, etc – and mining our own wealth out of the ground and growing not only our own food, but the world’s food will do it.  And in order to get there, we have to re-work our tax and regulatory systems to ensure that those who are willing to make, mine and grow things are left unhindered and, indeed, fostered by government action.  And even then, good people, it will be 20 years before American prosperity returns fully.

But, we can do it, if we want…now, do we want to?

Liberal States Worst for Business

Mark Noonan36 Comments

Another example of the results of applied liberalism – from the Chicago Tribune:

…Nearly one quarter of the survey’s 322 respondents said Illinois had one of the least favorable business climates, according to Development Counsellors International, which specializes in economic development and tourism marketing.

Taxes and high costs were among the factors that contributed to the state’s poor showing in the survey. California was deemed to have the worst business climate, followed by New York and Illinois…

…Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina were viewed as having the best business climates, according to the survey.

It is just a simple fact of life – the more taxes and regulations you throw on business, the harder it becomes for business to exist.  Liberals are steadily killing the goose which laws the golden eggs.  The only businesses which can do well are those who donate heavily to liberals…and in return such businesses get tax and regulatory breaks.  But, still, the overall effect on business is chilling…and the worst effect is not so much the actual taxes and regulations, but the fact that taxes and regulations can be increased or changed on a whim.  Some liberal State legislator gets a burr up his butt and all of a sudden a new tax is laid or another onerous regulation imposed.  Because of this, business either flees to friendlier jurisdictions or, at best, just stands pat and never expands.

We are getting a very useful course of instruction right now – our States are pretty much divided between Red and Blue.  Not too many States with a really divided government.  And, so, the experiment is proceeding…liberalism being applied here, conservatism being applied there.  In a few, short years the inescapable results will be in, and the people will be able to see, finally and for good, which set of policies actually works.  And not just in a purely business sense – the stunning turn around in Wisconsin following upon Walker’s reforms are showing that even in government action, applied conservatism provides better government at a lower cost.

We’re watching the process of liberalism killing itself off…it can no longer hide behind conservative forces coming to liberalism’s rescue.  No more can some like an uber-liberal Dukakis in Massachusetts claim a  liberal “economic miracle” which was actually brought about by Reagan policies nationally.  No longer can a liberal President take credit for welfare reform and a balanced budget brought forth by a Republican Congress.  Liberalism is out on its own…and it is failing, with no one to blame but liberalism.

We might be witnessing Liberalism’s last year…and it may come about that it will never trouble us again, at least through our life times.

HAT TIP:  Mish’s

Fast and Furious Body Count: 200

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From Townhall:

In a conference call this morning with Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa, reporters were told the Attorney General in Mexico has confirmed at least 200 murders south of the border happened as a result of Operation Fast and Furious.

“I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, as the Attorney General in Mexico is so concerned, she’s made the point that at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with these weapons and probably countless more,” Issa said.

Eleven crimes in the United States have been linked to Operation Fast and Furious up to this point. Issa said he expects as the investigation in the operation continues, more crimes connected to Fast and Furious will come to light and be exposed. This is not surprising, considering out of 2500 weapons the Obama Justice Department allowed to “walk,” and that only 600 have been recovered…

This, my fellow Americans, is a stain upon our national honor – it was we, through our government, which allowed these weapons to flow to Mexico.  We did it deliberately – and, why?  My view, as I’ve said before, is that it was a sick attempt to reinvigorate the gun control forces in this nation.  Not being able to get any traction as all the gun control ideology has proven false, someone cooked up a plan to arm Mexican criminals and then blame honest, innocent American gun dealers for the weapons…we were never supposed to find out that the weapons were purchased by the US government and illegally transferred to the drug gangs.

In order to restore our national honor in this matter we simply must get to the bottom of it – we must find out exactly who ordered this program to go forward and, in the best case scenario, ensure they see the inside of a jail cell.  People are dead because someone in DC made an egregiously stupid decision…we owe it to the dead to punish the guilty and ensure it never happens again.

Poll: Obama Leads Palin by 5 Points

Mark Noonan23 Comments

From the Miami Herald:

…After trailing Obama by more than 20 percentage points in polls all year, the new national survey, taken Sept. 13-14, found Palin trailing the president by just 5 points, 49-44 percent. The key reason: She now leads Obama among independents, a sharp turnaround.

Overall, the gains among Republicans “speak to Obama’s decline among independents generally, and how the middle is not his right now,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the national survey…

She is not even an announced candidate and she’s been the victim of a three year long slander campaign which did not even spare her children from the muck…and she’s only five points back of The One!  This is the kind of poll which is going to make Democrats reach for the antacid.

 

Solnydra Exec’s to Take the 5th

Mark Noonan4 Comments

And I don’t mean a nice bottle of Scotch – from Reuters:

Solyndra LLC’s chief executive and chief financial officer will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions put to them at a Congressional hearing on Friday, according to letters from their attorneys obtained by Reuters.

In the letters sent to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, attorneys for Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison and CFO W. G. Stover said they advised their clients not to provide testimony during the hearings.

The bankrupt company’s $535 million federal loan guarantee is being investigated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee…

Which means, of course, that someone broke the law somewhere along the line…if you are honest as the day is long and have nothing to be ashamed of (or are of sufficient moral courage to admit to error, regardless of consequences), then you don’t take the 5th.  I know it is one of our bedrock rights…there is nothing wrong with refusing to answer as it might incriminate yourself.  But if you don’t answer, it means there is something incriminating going on.  Period.  End of story.

Likely they are keeping their mouths shut as their lawyers try to figure out whether any of them can get jail time for what happened…and their lawyers will likely demand some sort of immunity grant before they openly testify.  We can’t give it to them…they might take it and then just lie about what they know.  And we need to know what happened – only the threat of jail time will really get them to talk.  And if the genuinely turn State’s evidence, then we can consider being lenient…but nothing until we know for sure whatever they end up saying is completely factual.

What we need to know is just how the loan was made – who asked whom and why was it approved.  If there is criminal liability, then we need to ensure that everyone who made the decision sees the inside of a jail…and ultimately we need to know what the President knew, and when he knew it.  Maybe Obama is completely clear of this and it was rogue subordinates…but only a full investigation with complete White House cooperation can show that.

 

Shocking News: Secretaries Don’t Pay More than Buffett

Mark Noonan10 Comments

Yet another liberal lie disposed of  – from the AP:

…There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that’s less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent…

Doubling up on the dishonesty is the fact that Buffett routinely takes advantage of every tax break he can – and, indeed, has on-going disputes with the IRS as it claims Buffett owes more than he paid.  The bottom line is that the “millionaires pay more than secretaries” is a lie while the actions of people like Buffett prove that the call for a tax hike isn’t to make the rich “pay their fair share” but to allow Obama to more heavily tax the upper middle class (remember, in Obamunism, “millionaires and billionaires” start at $200,000.00 per year for individual income earners).

All part of the scam, at any rate.  Buffett makes his money off of the current, corrupt way of doing business.  If it weren’t for our Byzantine tax and regulatory codes and the ability of billionaires like Buffett to grease the palms of politicians, Buffett never would have made his money – certainly no where near the billions he currently has.  Buffett is a liberal financial shark who grows fat not out of creating wealth, but by siphoning it off from the productive by means of financial shennanigans.  But this does give Buffett a vested interest in the status quo…if the liberal State is swept away, so will Buffett’s ability to maintain and grow his horde.  And not just for Buffett, but for a host of such economic parasites.

So, come up with bogus stories claiming that secretaries pay more than billionaires, help Obama increase taxes on “the rich” which really works out to tax hikes on middle class people while the Buffetts of the world are unscathed…and finally hope that all the class warfare rhetoric and actions helps Obama get re-elected so the gravy train can keep rolling along.  That is all this was ever about…and it is all it ever will be about until we turn these cretins out.

 

Lightsquared Scandal: More Attempts to Influence Testimony

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From the Daily Beast:

LightSquared, a wireless network backed by billionaire Democratic donor Philip Falcone, could beam broadband Internet everywhere—but some military officials fear it could interfere with critical GPS signals. Now, as The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake exclusively reports, two U.S. officials allege the White House tried to influence their testimony to rush key testing, to LightSquare’s benefit..

…On Monday, a second witness, Anthony Russo, director of the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, told The Daily Beast that he too was asked by the OMB to insert the 90-day timeframe into his testimony before the House Science Committee, but he refused. The hearing originally was scheduled for Aug. 3, then rescheduled for Sept. 8.

“They gave that to me and presumably the other witnesses,” he said. “There is one sentence I disagreed with, which said that I thought the testing could be resolved in 90 days. So I took it out.”…

Are you grasping all that, liberals?  In service of a billionaire who is a Democrat and a donor to the party, the Obama Administration tried to smooth things along even though the US military and other agencies had grave questions about the risks of the new wireless project.  Do you begin to understand?  Does it start to dawn on you that all your liberalism is merely a cover for the Ruling Class to gain power and wealth?  They’ll throw  you a bone of “gay rights” or affirmative action, but the real program is just power and wealth…

I doubt you’ll get it.  For ages you have been propagandized that it is we Republicans who do that…and, to be sure, you can find the odd Republican here and there willing to sell out to corporate interests.  But not like this – not in a systemic fashion where everything is for sale.  And the base of the GOP is firmly against this “crony capitalism” and wishes for a restored, genuine free market in which well-connected corporate bosses aren’t able to suppress competitors and gain government privileges.

More and more it looks as though the Obama Administration – in pure, Chicago-style politics – as put a “for sale” sign on the United States.  While Pelosi and Reid ran Congress, there was no oversight at all…and that is why it is only now, 8 months after the GOP took the House, that it is all coming to light.  We all expected Obama’s liberalism and we feared the Chicago Way…but even I didn’t suspect that Obama and his cohorts would be so crude and grasping in these matters…that they would act no better than a Chicago ward boss.

Now more than ever it is vital that Obama be defeated next year…this is already bad enough, but imagine what it will be like if Obama is re-elected and never has to fear the voters again?  It will become a corrupt free-for-all and our national inheritance will go to the highest bidder.

UPDATE:  Rep. Issa to hold hearings on these screwball loans and the general Obama Administration practice of trying to pick free market winners.

Obama’s Great Service to America

Mark Noonan19 Comments

We actually are fortunate to have him as our President – he has made liberalism toxic.  Victor Davis Hanson runs down the ways and then concludes:

…Had McCain been elected, or had Obama proved a canny Clinton triangulator, we would never have gotten out of the bipartisan rut of massive borrowing, growing government, higher taxes, and unionized public employee regulators. But with Obama as the great liberal deliverer and with the masses scared to death of Him, the next president will inherit an America in catharsis. The future is uncertain, but at least now, after our cauterizing, we have some sort of chance to return to the old principles that might save us.

Carter made liberalism a dirty word.  It wasn’t until 2008, with Obama, that liberalism was rehabilitated and people could actually call themselves that and not be laughed off…we had forgotten.  We had, that is, forgotten Carter…just how lousy he was and just how destructive liberalism is.  But now we’ve had Obama applying it to America and we’re falling apart…and people are noticing.

Revolution is coming – just as Carter’s liberalism allowed us to usher in the Reagan Revolution, so will Obama’s liberalism herald the Second American Revolution.  And this time I think we’re going to win so big that the liberals won’t be able to stop us, at all…always remember that Reagan was stymied by Democrat control of the House.  He couldn’t ever go all out…in 2013, the next Republican President might have such a large Congressional majority that we can steam roller through whatever we please…and after the Obama dose of liberalism, the people will be eager to back any plan for radical reform.

Everyone does have a purpose – and perhaps Obama’s was to destroy liberalism?  Time will tell…

 

Why the Palestinian Authority is Failing

Mark Noonan11 Comments

If you ever wonder why the PA is now pushing Statehood and essentially causing all sorts of trouble, you need look no further than this Bloomberg news story:

…Last week, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank identified the authority’s financial crisis as a danger to the state-building program which Fayyad’s administration has led over the last two years.

In the last three months, the authority has twice failed to pay salaries to its 150,000 employees on time  and in full.

The success of the state-building plan was one of the reasons cited by Palestinian officials for their decision to go to the United Nations, despite U.S. and Israeli opposition…

The story, itself, is about how Saudi Arabia is pledging $200 million to the PA – missed in the story, because it is an MSM report, is the real issue:  the Palestinian Authority has 150,000 employees.  There are 4,000,000 or so Palestinians…to put it in to American terms, this is the equivalent of us having 11,250,000 federal government employees; right now, there are about 3,000,000 federal employees.  Even if you add in the military, you get nowhere near the proportion of government employees to population of the PA.

What this tells us is that the PA is nothing more than a con job…a way for corrupt oligarchs and appartchiks to latch themselves upon a population and live well.  All that talk of Palestinian Statehood?  All the rancor and blood and gore and mess?  Nothing but a means to an end – and the end is a bunch of people who don’t do a lick of work getting fat off of others.  I’m deadly serious here…we are not faced with a movement of national liberation, but by a group of thugs who want money they didn’t earn.

The main thing to remember about the state of the world today is that in all lands there are people who have figured out how to gain un-earned wealth.  Our liberals think in terms of rich people like corporate CEOs and the like…and they actually do have a bit of a case, but they blow it by not realizing that the corporate CEOs are only a tiny number, at most, of all those living off those who produce wealth.  Here’s a small list of those living off the work of others:

Activists of various stripes (some call them “community organizers”, race-baiting grievance-mongers, Wall Street gamblers (as opposed to actual investors), college professors who let others teach their classes, union bosses, trial lawyers, education administrators, most welfare recipients, layers of corporate and bureaucratic paper pushers who do nothing to help an actual person, most of the people manning NGOs, departments of higher education which don’t produce things like doctors and engineers, probably well more than half the people on disability…and a host of dictators and hangers-on around the world which have fastened themselves on various populations.  They don’t work; they don’t earn their positions (gaining them by favor or by blood); they don’t do anything worthwhile for the whole, human race…but they live well; always vastly better than the general run of the population they live amongst.  The Palestinian Authority is just another one of the scams…a put on using the words of liberation and nationhood to sucker fools in to handing them money and power…and using theft and murder to maintain themselves and gain more.

It is high time we stopped falling for this nonsense…the Palestinians could have State-hood next week with generously drawn borders and massive amounts of financial aid to build their economy…but as long as the Palestinian leadership is made up of thieves, murderers and con-artists, we’ll get nowhere.  They don’t want a functioning State for the Palestinian people to live and build in…if that started up, there’d be no place for the current leadership.  So, they’ll just keep up the wickedness (and why not?  It got their leader a Nobel Prize and themselves well paid sinecures in government) and hope that we keep being suckers, forever.  Same thing with all the other people causing mayhem, misery and murder around the world…they are just after personal power and wealth that they cannot earn in a free society by offering something useful to their fellow citizens.  The sooner we wake up to what they are and start laying stripes on their backs, the quicker we can have peace.

And then we can turn to the con artists in our own land…no need to be quite that harsh as they haven’t actually murdered anyone…but it is high time we stopped kowtowing to their pretensions and their whines and started demanding they pull their weight.  The world will always be a place of sorrow and trial…but no need for us to make it worse by allowing others to take advantage of us.

 

 

Perry Wades in to the Israel/Palestinian Issue

Mark Noonan8 Comments

From the Jerusalem Post:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry will hold a press conference with American and Israeli-Jewish leaders in New York on Tuesday in which he is expected to address the upcoming deliberations at the United Nations, MK Danny Danon (Likud), said on Saturday night.

Danon, who will participate at the press conference, said he would ask Perry ahead of the conference to adopt the initiative the MK is advancing to annex Judea and Samaria in response to the unilateral Palestinian moves at the UN…

That does sound like a reasonable plan to me – if the Palestinians are going to do things without relation to the desires of Israel, I see no reason why Israel shouldn’t work the same way.  Palestinians get their UN-sponsored State, Israel gets Judea and Samaria.  Fair trade, if you ask me.

On the other hand, the Palestinians can get title to Judea and Samaria…all they have to do is make peace with Israel.  Real peace – not a sham where they speak words of peace in English for the MSM and then shout “death to the Jews” in so many words in Arabic back home.

Outside of that, it is about time that Perry and the rest of the GOP field started to really differentiate themselves from Obama foreign and defense policies.  Obamunism as an economic policy has been bad, but Obamunism as a foreign policy has been a disaster.  It is best if you are respected and loved in the world. Failing that, respected is good.  In the final analysis, if you can get respect or love, then you’d better be feared.  Right now, no one fears us, respects us or loves us.  We hit the crest of a wave of power and influence in mid-2003 and its been downhill since then…courtesy of the American left which first sabotaged Bush, and then ensured that Obama went from bad to worse in foreign policy.  And terribly sorry, liberals, but killing bin Laden doesn’t make up for it.

We’ve got Iran on the march to nuclear weapons and starting to interfere in neighboring States; Islamist governments look to take control of both Libya and Egypt; the Assad regime in Syria is maintaining itself in power; Turkey is becoming overtly anti-Israeli and bidding for leadership of Islamism; Russia is throwing spokes in our wheel at every opportunity and China is building a military to challenge us in the western Pacific.  We’re in a pickle and it’ll be ten years of hard work before we can restore our position.

In this, Perry has picked out the right cause – the extinction of Israel is a goal of all American enemies…be they open enemies like the Islamists or disguised enemies like European bureaucrats seeking to degrade the United States to secondary power status.  Israel is hated – anti-Semitism is on the rise; the only thing in favor of backing Israel is the fact that backing Israel is the absolutely right thing to do.  By so doing we lay down the marker…we draw the line in the sand and say, “not one bit further”.  Here, we fight, if necessary.  Here we shout defiance at the world and tell them that for Americans basic, human decency still calls the shots…we won’t allow another Holocaust; we won’t surrender the Jews to death in order to buy a half decade of peace for ourselves.  From that firm base, we can then go forward to rebuild the rest of our global position…surrender it, and we’ll soon find ourselves completely isolated in a world of enemies gathering for the kill.

So, good for Perry and I hope the rest of the GOP field follows suit.