Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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Locally out of state LLCs have been buying houses at the County tax auction every year, renting them out, then failing to follow any of the requirements or upkeeping the properties in any way. After a few years of getting rents they abandon the property leaving the local city with the cost of tearing down the dangerous buildings. Because of the way the enforcement mechanisms work they can't actually make the out of state, hidden owner, LLC pay any fines or show up in court. The county, heavily Republican run on every level, refuses to do a thing about this including making bidders at the auction be linked to a real person. The county gets ALL the money from these auctions. The city, which switched to a gay Democrat as mayor a couple of years ago as this issue started, is stuck with ALL the costs. The Republicans, quite the villains, blame the Democrats for this issue caused by their actions and the regulations they wrote and are now blocking changing.

It's horrible.
 
Stacyhs said:
Like I said, if they continue to pay the tax at the rate I mentioned but can delay paying the increase until they house is sold (or even inherited), the state still gets its money.

I really don't want to get into a big discussion about this. It's just not that important to me.
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It's been done quite a bit already in other threads, and I don't think there will ever be a solution that suits all. Some will cuss that people can sit on an appreciating investment and not pay for it unless it's taxed according to the market and others will point out that it amounts to a penalty for stability and durability in which a market you do not control tells you whether you're worthy to keep your house. Somewhere in the middle is something that injures both sides a little and doesn't kill too many.
 
Being a renter who plans to buy as soon as possible (presumably by summer/fall this year), I've been watching YouTube videos by realtors & mortgage specialists, mostly about advice and what to expect in the process, but the same people also often talk about whether the current situation is a bubble about to pop.

Some of the signs of it are there. The market constantly worsening for buyers and the buyers constantly getting more desperate and putting up with worse treatment is a repeat of what happened before previous housing market crashes, including the most memorable one.

But the fact that that's the way the trend has gone lately doesn't mean it's about to change or ever has to change. Japan has 100-year mortgages. China has down payments that take a couple of generations to save up, and that's just to start a 70-year lease from the government, not to really own. It definitely can get much worse than it has gotten here so far; if there's some limit at which a currently unknown law of the universe will block it from getting worse for buyers because it just can't get worse anymore, it's at least somewhere beyond the Japan/China level, which means we are free to keep cruising in that direction for a long time before we bounce off of it. And I notice that those who say there's got to be a crash coming don't give specific reasons/mechanisms for why that must be the case, just a vague sense of "this is really drastic, and drastic things don't persist; they always swing back".

Meanwhile, the ones who go into a bit more detail take the opposite view: as much as this runup looks like the last runup in some ways, it's also different in some crucial other ways.
  1. Last time, a lot of it had to do with unqualified buyers taking mortgages they couldn't afford and then ending up not paying them. This time, lenders haven't been letting them do that, so the current crop of owners are not out of their league like those were, which means they're not heading for foreclosure.
  2. Last time, the supply of houses was fine, or arguably excessive. This time, a lot of the price runup can be traced directly back to a shortage of that supply.
  3. Even if supply does start increasing soon, it can't possibly happen so rapidly that it's really much of a shock to the system; there are too many buyers waiting in the wings who are currently priced out of the market but would be right back in as soon as the pressure starts to back off even marginally.
  4. Even the very recent updates that some would point to as a sign that the bubble's about to pop (like lengthening time-on-market and increasing foreclosures) are actually small shifts that are only slowing down the rate at which things keep going in the same direction, not stopping the overall trend or reverse it. (And on the increase in foreclosures in particular, it's not coming from the fundamentals of the market; it's because a foreclosure moratorium ended so now we're getting the foreclosures that would have happened over the last year or two but were blocked.)
So it doesn't look to me as if it's really getting better in the foreseeable future, even for just a few years, which seems to be all that a major crash really gets us anyway. It just might get worse at a slower rate for a while.
 
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tyr_13 said:
Locally out of state LLCs have been buying houses at the County tax auction every year, renting them out, then failing to follow any of the requirements or upkeeping the properties in any way. After a few years of getting rents they abandon the property leaving the local city with the cost of tearing down the dangerous buildings. Because of the way the enforcement mechanisms work they can't actually make the out of state, hidden owner, LLC pay any fines or show up in court. The county, heavily Republican run on every level, refuses to do a thing about this including making bidders at the auction be linked to a real person. The county gets ALL the money from these auctions. The city, which switched to a gay Democrat as mayor a couple of years ago as this issue started, is stuck with ALL the costs. The Republicans, quite the villains, blame the Democrats for this issue caused by their actions and the regulations they wrote and are now blocking changing.

It's horrible.
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SOP, really.
 
Aridas said:
We've got another horrible Biden scandal!!!!!!



Oh, and another one! Biden's boring and isn't constantly schmoozing up with the elites/establishment!
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Fox News histrionics aside, it's probably worth pointing out that Democrats repeatedly doing covert advertisements for "Jeni's Ice Cream" is a pretty gross example of the low level corruption that is common in our political system.

The owner is a bigtime backer of the Democratic party and is from Ohio, an important swing state, so throwing money her way by buying the ice cream as donor gifts or doing free advertisements like this probably doesn't hurt. Not even close to the biggest kinds of corruption in our politics, but still gross seeing how the sausage gets made.

Biden and other dems doing these photo-ops isn't meaningfully different than when right wingers hawk "MyPillow" and I find it all pretty gross. Politicians should not be doing product placement advertising for their wealthy donors.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Fox News histrionics aside, it's probably worth pointing out that Democrats repeatedly doing covert advertisements for "Jeni's Ice Cream" is a pretty gross example of the low level corruption that is common in our political system.

The owner is a bigtime backer of the Democratic party and is from Ohio, an important swing state, so throwing money her way by buying the ice cream as donor gifts or doing free advertisements like this probably doesn't hurt. Not even close to the biggest kinds of corruption in our politics, but still gross seeing how the sausage gets made.

Biden and other dems doing these photo-ops isn't meaningfully different than when right wingers hawk "MyPillow" and I find it all pretty gross. Politicians should not be doing product placement advertising for their wealthy donors.
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Agreed.
 
It's a Wall Street Jrnl poll, so it does not have that much meaning. But the number of voters that don't like either could lead to some rather odd solutions by either party by the time 2024 comes around.

President Biden and former President Trump are tied in a hypothetical match-up in 2024, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll released Friday.

The poll found that both Biden and Trump each would get 45 percent support from voters in a theoretical head-to-head in two years.

Both politicians appear to be dogged by high disapproval ratings.

Fifty-seven percent of voters said in the poll they have an unfavorable view of Biden, while 55 percent said they had an unfavorable view of Trump.

Almost 15 percent of voters have unfavorable views of both leaders. That group breaks for Biden by a 36 percent-24 percent margin. However, in a sign that difference is largely anti-Trump more than pro-Biden, those voters also say by a 42 percent-29 percent margin that they intend to vote for Republican congressional candidates later this year.

A rematch of the 2020 presidential race in 2024 is a distinct possibility.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/597823-biden-trump-tied-in-hypothetical-2024-matchup-poll/
 
Tero said:
It's a Wall Street Jrnl poll, so it does not have that much meaning. But the number of voters that don't like either could lead to some rather odd solutions by either party by the time 2024 comes around.


https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/597823-biden-trump-tied-in-hypothetical-2024-matchup-poll/
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I very much suspect "I'm not Trump" is a one-trick pony that won't be as exciting the second time around.

Biden ran on a fairly ambitious set of policy agendas, and thanks to stonewalling from "moderates" within his party allying with Republicans, accomplished very little of it. This will only get worse if the midterms result in complete loss of Senate control, which seems likely.

I'm very much looking forward to learning how these likely future losses are the left's fault. :rolleyes:
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I very much suspect "I'm not Trump" is a one-trick pony that won't be as exciting the second time around.

Biden ran on a fairly ambitious set of policy agendas, and thanks to stonewalling from "moderates" within his party allying with Republicans, accomplished very little of it. This will only get worse if the midterms result in complete loss of Senate control, which seems likely.

I'm very much looking forward to learning how these likely future losses are the left's fault. :rolleyes:
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No, what I meant, looking at those numbers, is that if Trump does not actually run, but merely supports the actual candidate, then Democrats are also likely to run someone other than Biden. This will give us a fresh start and finally move on from Trump.

If GOP runs Trump, dems will run Biden.
 
Tero said:
No, what I meant, looking at those numbers, is that if Trump does not actually run, but merely supports the actual candidate, then Democrats are also likely to run someone other than Biden. This will give us a fresh start and finally move on from Trump.

If GOP runs Trump, dems will run Biden.
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I think you're wildly underestimating how much power entrenches itself. If Biden/Trump are still healthy enough to run, nobody will be able to stop them regardless what the polls say.

The idea that Trump or Biden will step aside for the greater good of their party's electoral chances is overlooking how much personal ambition drives these decisions.
 
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I don't think it will go well for Trump, then. He simply does not have the long term concentration to carry out a campaign let alone be president. He did not like most of it in his first 4 years. Voters sitting on the fence will not go with him. A Biden with a Republican congress will work oit fine for them. The next president in 2028 election will be a somewhat Trump-like Republican.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I very much suspect "I'm not Trump" is a one-trick pony that won't be as exciting the second time around.
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It wasn't working the first time either until it was rescued by a virus.

SuburbanTurkey said:
Biden ran on a fairly ambitious set of policy agendas, and thanks to stonewalling from "moderates" within his party allying with Republicans, accomplished very little of it.
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Worse than failing, he hasn't even really tried. It was never anything he really wanted; it was just there to trick people into voting for him.

SuburbanTurkey said:
I'm very much looking forward to learning how these likely future losses are the left's fault. :rolleyes:
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And that, plus exactly the same kind of argument they used for Biden in the first place, will be why they tell us we need President Manchin next.
 
Biden just called what what Russia is doing in Ukraine genocide. This is upping the rhetoric quite a bit.
Also, Pentagon is sending more weapons to the Ukraine including for the first time aircraft..attack helicopters and Bradely AFV.
Something is esclating the situation.
 
To poke at a couple things related to the inflation challenge facing Biden and the US -

All McConnell does is whine that we're not fixing GOP's economic mess fast enough

Republicans continue to block legislation that would both help middle-class Americans pay for necessities and, according to 17 Nobel laureates, “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”
Inflation is currently a global phenomenon, and the U.S. economy’s recovery under Biden has been faster than that of its competitors.

<snip>

NEW: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) just shut down Mitch McConnell at a press conference: “There was $7 trillion in new debt and 2.6 million jobs lost during Trump. But when McConnell comes to this podium, all he does is complain that we’re not cleaning up their mess fast enough.”
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And...

Texas GOP official calls Abbott's policy 'economy killing action' as protests over delays continue

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s stunt forcing commercial trucks to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections at ports of entry is turning into an economic and political disaster: a 60% drop in commercial traffic, continued protests by outraged Mexican truckers, and now condemnation from a fellow right-wing state official.

The Texas Tribune reports Texas Agriculture Commissioner and similarly terrible Republican Sid Miller labeled Abbott’s policy—which was launched in retaliation for the Biden administration’s just decision to end use of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist policy stomping on U.S. asylum law—“political theater.”

The report said the official told Abbott in a letter that his stunt “is not stopping illegal immigration,” but instead “stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks—many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies.” Miller called Abbott’s stunt an “economy killing action.”

<snip>

But as when he was confronted about the human costs of his Operation Lone Star scheme, he’ll likely just complaint about the president. Oh wait—Caller Times reports an Abbott spokesperson was already doing that. Mark Miner “sought to pin the blame on Biden,” the report said.

"It's going to be very bad for the Texas economy. It's going to be very bad for the national economy," Abbott’s Democratic challenger for governor, Beto O’Rourke, told Caller Times. "When you see those trucks lined up miles deep all the way into Mexico, what you're seeing is inflation, what you're seeing is higher prices at the grocery store, and what you're seeing are more supply chain problems. We are calling on Greg Abbott to end this policy today."
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Biden talking about sending a high ranking...cabient level offiical to Kiev to meet with Zalinsky.
Don't talk about it;do it.
I am cncerned that the Biden adminsration seems to have the slows on Ukrainie too often.
This is no time for Business as Usual.
 
This thing will drag on. Back in the early two weeks, I thought Putin was going to get what he wants (Donbas etc.) and be done with it by now. But this is just going to slide into the North and South Korea thing, with also some fighting going on, for the remainder of Biden's term. And somehow, the Bush thing will not work here. Voters want "someone else," especially Trumpsters and independents. DeSantis?
 
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