What the home and mortgage market needs — and it will not recover until then — is a rebooting to current values. To do that, principal amounts must be reset. They need to be reset not by government force, but by letting the market work. Let bankrupt mortgage holders fail.
The housing market has gone nowhere since the meltdown. Some 14 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages. A good percentage of those people have stopped making their monthly payments.
Over several decades of employment, French actor Gerard Depardieu has paid more than one hundred million dollars in taxes. Several weeks ago, facing tax rates that would have cost him 75 percent of all earnings in excess of one million euros, Depardieu fled the country that considers him a national treasure. He relocated 800 yards across the border into a tiny Belgi... (more)
Real estate, and the careers that depend upon it, is a boom-bust business in the age of inflation. The illusion of wealth is everywhere..until it is snatched away.
That’s why it’s a great time for David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Glengarry Glen Ross” to make its third appearance on the Broadway stage. It’s a show about Chicago real estate salesmen selling Florida properties through deception and intimidation.
The show appears just as Iowa dirt ascends to new he... (more)
In a disgraceful show of political expediency, Congress put its own political self-interest ahead of the national interest. They "saved" us from a contrived crisis of their own making, only to condem us to a far more horrific fate when the real crisis arrives. This one will come not because we went over the fiscal cliff, but because we avoided doing so. Going over the ... (more)
At least two members-only recreational marijuana clubs opened in Colorado Monday, one in Denver and one in the small southern Colorado town of Del Norte, according to the Associated Press. The club openings come less than a month after Gov. John Hickenlooper certified the results of the November vote on Amendment 64, which legalized for adults 21 and over the possession of up to an ounce and the culti... (more)
America is rapidly becoming a nation of takers. An increasing number of Americans expect the government to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, and they expect the government to dig into the pockets of others in order to pay for it all. This philosophy can be very seductive, but what happens when the number of takers eventually outnumbers the number of producers? In 11 different U.S. states, the number of government dependents exceeds the number of private sector workers. This... (more)
A Cassandra is a hopelessly honest person, while a Pollyanna is an incredibly hopeful person, the incurable optimist. Cassandras are often disparaged as "nattering nabobs of negativism/negativity," instead of being looked upon as prophetic realists, while Pollyannas are deservedly dismissed as the "pandering puppies of positivity/positivism."... (more)
Oh so quietly, the Obama Administration has removed embarrassing data from the public eye. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) no longer provides information on tax migration within the U.S. There was no announcement from either the IRS or the Census Bureau, which co-operates in compiling data. The reports have simply ceased.
In 1991, the IRS began to offer statistics on the nu... (more)
Gas in Vegas is a dollar cheaper a gallon than in the Golden State, or so a friend and recent LA transplant tells me. He went on to say the top tax rate in California is over 13%, while, of course, Nevada has no state income tax.
Over dinner at Del Frisco’s, he explained how industries are being ruined by runaway government in his old home state. Nevada would surely benefit from businesses making their escape. Plenty of people are leaving California — nearly 700,000, I read somewh... (more)
What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leav... (more)
Dairy products in Canada cost roughly two to three times more than in the U.S. This has the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA) feeling cheesed.
In an open letter to the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC), the CRFA decried the current state of affairs:
Canada's restaurant industry purchases $2.5 billion a
By upping the ante once again in its gamble to revive the lethargic economy through monetary action, the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee is now compelling the rest of us to buy into a game that we may not be able to afford. At his press conference this week, Fed Chairman Bernanke explained how the easiest policy stance in Fed history has just gotten that much easier. First it gave us zero interest rates, then QEs I and II, Operation Twist, and finally "unlimited" QE3.
