zinfamous
No Lifer
- Jul 12, 2006
- 111,065
- 29,993
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We've had this conversation before. He's fine telling 80 year olds Dean and Mildred, who bought their house in the middle of no where in 1960 for $15,000, who are long retired on fixed income, that they must pay $10,000 a year in property tax now because suburban sprawl and "luck" have had their area be developed into high end country estates. His solution to this is they can take a negative mortgage out on their house to pay the taxes, and then, rather than be able to will the house they paid for decades on to their kids/grandkids/whoever, it disappears.
Or said another way, as long as Gov can get their fingers into someones pie so the Gov can blow more money, jelly. You all need to realize when you're being Nick'd LOL
well, isn't that why homes are the worst investment imaginable, anyway? Isn't this the kind of the thing we should support under pure capitalism, letting the market decide value?
Your argument here is essentially supporting people for making "dumb" decisions in the past and continuing to make "dumb" decisions in the present long after the market has clearly dictated their "dumb" decision.
This is a weird line of argument coming from the conservative rah-rah-ultra capitalists in here. Essentially supporting welfare/government regulation to halt market forces doing exactly what you would normally want them to do.
I guess you guys really were in favor of the auto bailout. :hmm:
A couple of things that so-called "smart, educated" people are supposed to understand before dumping a pile of cash into something as horribly stupid as a house:
--it will almost never appreciate at more than inflation
--the value of your "investment" is universally determined by factors well outside of your control, specifically: the value of the community where your precious little money hole is now forever rooted. and here to the point: economic and technological advances that caused a bunch of dillholes to move into their part of the earth and forever inflate property values beyond a reasonable and sustainable measure, unpredictably, and some time after Dean and Martha bought their little castle in cow heaven. You can no more control the forces that raise the value, and therefore taxes on their property, than you can stop economic and technological process. Best solution to this would have been to go back and stop the techboom from happening. I don't know...maybe through sound government regulation?
--urban sprawl and development: sorry, imminent domain has always been a factor. you know this.
I mean...I know what you are saying and while it does make sense, it rewards the losing side of the risk factor that we always knew was an issue when thinking that dumping a fresh pile of money into a steaming pile of a generally bad idea was, improbably, a good idea.
I thought our policies were supposed to reward bold risk? Why do you think we should stop doing that?