Then, later that same day, I received this pic from one of my relatives:
He said he took it at Newton's (2nd wealthiest in USA) town hall!
So, not everyone in Newton is loaded, right?
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. These clutterers and hoarders are psychologically afflicted. The owner of that car is most likely a millionaire - probably some 'old coot' that re-uses stamps not properly postmarked.
For sure, if you see a car like that, you ought to superglue some coins to the ground near it, urinate on them, and stand ready with popcorn and a fully charged camera.
As Newton Public Schools looks to privatize cafeteria services, the union representing the schools' 65 cafeteria workers is reaching out to Newton parents for support in the fight to keep the workers' jobs.
In a letter to several Parent Teacher Organizations, Tim Curry, president of the Newton Public School Custodians Association, the union which represent cafeteria and custodial workers, advocates against the outsourcing, saying it will lead to poor service. He said the 65 workers rely heavily on their salaries to support their families.
"These workers, almost exclusively female, have dedicated many years of service to the system and, are among the lowest paid workers in the system," Curry writes. "Your children deserve to have someone handling their food who has a strong connection to the community and is concerned about the quality of food services for those children. The employees who live in this community and whose children also have attended Newton Schools will provide that service; contracted employees with no connection to Newton will not."
Blah, blah, blah. Wa, wa, wa. Cry me a river!
On Sunday, Mayor Setti Warren announced an estimated $6 million gap in the school budget for Newton.
I know the answer(s), but I have to scream out loud, "How the [bleep] does a town of 83,000 people develop a $6 million ANNUAL school budget deficit?!"
In an interview, Curry said it is not fair to blame money loss
[sic] on the workers. Many of the cafeteria workers are older women, and many live in Newton, he said. Not their fault?
Except:
Last May, the Newton School Committee voted to explore the option of privatization of the cafeteria services after a subcommittee found that the school district expects to lose$905,000 on food services last year, compared with $416,000 in 2006. Part of the deficit, the subcommittee reported, stems from low participation in the school lunch program, ranging from 25 percent at the city's high schools to 60 percent at Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School.
Well perhaps if they cooked something the kids liked...!!!
For those of you unaware, Newton, where I happened to live before discovering Boston's South Shore, is one freakin' wealthy town. All they have to do is make everyone brownbag their lunch and it'll single-handedly erase probably $1 million out of the $6 million deficit.
It almost goes without saying, that every single aspect of government schools - no matter the high-priced town - is a profound joke.
They can't manage milk and cookies, yet people are content to let them manage the minds of their precious children.
(BTW, Newton is the worst place I've ever lived - in terms of intolerable Morons and assorted mind deviants. I'd rather live in ultra-loony Cambridge, MA!)
A food services manager at a Newton elementary school said she was suspended this week for feeding students other items after they refused to eat the day's veggie burgers for lunch.
Kathleen Cunningham said she was suspended for an incident that occurred May 4, when Angier Elementary School received veggie burgers instead of the grilled cheese sandwiches that were on the menu.
When about seven or eight students refused to eat the veggie burgers, she said, she let them choose other lunch items, including a bagel lunch or a breakfast lunch.
The bagel lunch includes a bagel, cream cheese, fruit, vegetables, and cheese sticks. The breakfast lunch has cereal, yogurt, fruit, vegetables, and cheese sticks.
"Morally, can I let a kid go without a lunch when he’s telling me he’s not going to eat?"
Hah!
Veggie burgers are indeed immoral!
Here's another distressing excerpt from that article:
Faced with an expected deficit of nearly $1 million in food services next year, the Newton School Committee is considering whether to privatize the breakfast and lunch program — a possibility that has the roiled relations with the schools’ roughly 90 food service employees and their union.
I find it hard to believe that a town's school system could have 90 unionized lunch ladies.
And I find it hard to believe the school's *food service* could run a $1 million annual deficit!
Newton, Massachusetts is one of the wealthiest towns up here. Parts of the town average, AVERAGE, $200,000 in household income.
Exactly why can't the kids bring their own lunches and they just sell drinks from vending machines?
Everything about the *schools* has long since passed the point of inanity.
The lunch ladies always were crazy.
Before I went to a *magnet* elementary school, I attended the neighborhood one (through second grade).
The cafeteria was run by a handful of *lunch ladies* so there were no teachers present. After eating, they made us line up at the door to go to recess. BUT, we most certainly were not allowed to put our coats on until we got outside.
If they espied any renegade grade-schooler who prematurely put their jacket on.....they'd go ballistic and scream, "TAKE YOUR COAT OFF....IF YOU PUT YOUR COAT ON BEFORE YOU GO OUT YOU WILL CATCH A COLD!!!"
Surely, if there were a pool outside, these 'old bags' would make us wait 30 minutes after lunch before we went swimming.
I am moving 30 miles east to the South Shore at the end of this month. Unlike my last two moves, my wife's employer is not paying for this one. So I am currently scrounging for boxes and will likely rent a truck to move myself.
One can easily spend a few hundred bucks on boxes, that is if you are a Luddite. On Craigslist, there are plenty of ads stating, "Free Moving Boxes". Why is that? Well, if you haven't lived in a decent sized place you might not realize how many boxes a small family can fill up when it moves. Probably the guestimate would be anywhere from 50-100 large boxes. Once you move in, unpacking them is a chore in its own right. You'll be swimming in packing paper and you'll desperately want those cumbersome boxes out of your way.
The thing is, free moving boxes don't last very long - especially not in Boston where everyone is cheap and always on the move. The first few ads I responded to too late. But last night, someone posted an ad for their boxes that "weren't broken down" and here was my response.
Hi—we are close by, on the other side of route 9. I can come take them all—doesn’t matter that they are not broken down. I can come any time that is convenient for you. Call or email anytime. Thanks so much!!!
They contacted me early this morning, I put my two kids in the car, and ran over. The guy told me he had tons of responses and he obviously drafted me because I was nearby and because I implied that I would break them down. When I arrived, there it was, a veritable mountain of boxes piled throughout his three car garage. Utility knife in hand, it still took me a good 45 minutes of frenzied work to remove all the packing paper and flatten the boxes out for transport.
I said to the guy, this is what you call a "intersection of mutual needs". In other words, he needed the boxes removed and I was in the market for low cost moving supplies.
In the pre-Craigslist days, this is a transaction that likely would have never taken place. He'd have thrown out his boxes, I'd have wasted money on new ones, and all sorts of time and energy would have been squandered on unproductive activity.
It almost goes without saying that this is the profound beauty of the internet. The web hasn't just lubricated transactions, it's created whole new markets and efficiencies on everything from buying a stock to finding a date to recycling moving boxes.
The bulls yammer these days about "productivity" and how businesses are increasingly getting more done with less. I never liked how academically nebulous that sounded. I firmly believe that the massive economic expansion since 9/11 is due almost entirely to the internet and the enhanced telecommunication it has facilitated. The way I see it, the internet bubble never really popped; it's still expanding and it never really was a "bubble". It's more a phenomenon, a juggernaut, or an elixir whose point of diminishing return is still nowhere in sight.
The gentleman with the free boxes asked where and why I was moving. In a momentary lapse of tact, I left out the part about my hating his new hometown of Newton - after all, the poor guy just paid probably $1.5 million bones for the house he just moved into.
He and his wife were tangibly ecstatic that I had just cleaned out their garage of that massive mess. The guy also bragged that he sold his Brookline condo on Craigslist in three days back in March, sans broker of course. Understandably, he kept singing the praises of Craigslist.
Guy - The other great part about this (i.e. me taking his boxes) is that we get to save some trees.
I rolled my eyes and said to myself,
"This is precisely why he is moving into Newton and we are running far from it."
On November 29th, Congressmen Barney Frank (S - Massachusetts) appeared on the O'Reilly Factor. Frank is no political lightweight; he'll chair the House Financial Services Committee when the Democrats take control of Congress in January.
Definitely watch the video first. I've transcribed the important exchange below - though it's a thoroughly inadequate substitute for the viewing experience.
BillO - Do you believe in income redistribution?
BF - To some extent the whole country does...George Bush supports a tax structure in which people at the upper end get taxes much more than people at the lower end. It's called progressive taxation. But that's not what I've been talking about mostly now. The problem we have now is not that the government isn't doing enough to redistribute to the lower end but that the government is doing too much to redistribute it to the higher end.
BillO - Do you believe in it or not?
BF - Stop being a silly would-be district attorney...Bill if you want to do that go to law school. The fact is I told you I do like George Bush does.
BillO - You're not like George Bush. That's ridiculous.
BF - Bill, will you please stop interrupting?
BillO - When you say something dopey, I am going to point it out.
BF - I came on the show to have a coherent conversation...
BillO - And I asked you a question and...
BF - And as I try to answer it you keep interrupting. It's your style when you don't like the answer...
BillO - It's YOUR STYLE to make an invalid comparison between you and George Bush....That's bull.
BF - I said that I agree with George Bush that people at the upper end of the income scale should be taxed more than people at the lower end.
BillO - That's not income redistribution. . . .. BillO - What's the top tax rate? What should it be?
BF - I think when Bill Clinton had it at 39%, we had a very good economy. But that of course is only part of the problem because you are trying to ignore the issue that public policies today are in fact (effect?) going in the reverse direction and what we've seen is more and more of the wealth that we've created in this society is staying in the hands of very few people and I would like to see public policies that distribute the wealth more fairly. I'm not talking about taking from the rich and giving to the working classes or poor. I am talking about a fairer share of the increased wealth because as Alan Greenspan said a couple of years ago, it's all going recently to a handful of people. I am talking about just sharing the increase instead of redistributing.
BillO - 39%, you think is a fair top rate.
BF - Yeah, I said that.
CaptiousNut - Actually BF, no you didn't say that. You blurted out some vague connection to the internet bubble and a 39% tax rate.
Boy would I have loved to have been there asking my socialist Congressman questions. Bill did a decent job (compared to his peers in the news business) but it's nothing like to what I would have laid on the slimy stammerer. Of course, Bill can't "drill" Barney too hard or he'll never come back on the show. I predict it will be a while before Barney appears again given his embarrassing performance.
Now is Frank a liar or a complete Moron?
What I mean is, does he truly believe in confiscating money from the working rich and handing it to the non-working, morally-challenged poor and just doesn't want to admit to it?
Or he is so thoroughly stupid that he really thinks he answered the darn question?
Hey Barney do you believe in X?
Well, to some extent the whole country does....
What???????
He mocks Bill as a "would-be district attorney" but there isn't a judge in the land that would permit such outright evasion. Your honor, will you please direct the witness to answer the question?
Now how many lies can Barney cram into his non-answer?
The whole country supports progressive taxation?
First of all, I don't support it. Libertarians are likely all against it. Steve Forbes has been advocating a flat-tax for many years and ran for President on that platform in 1996. Not to mention most especially that HIGH INCOME EARNERS DON'T SUPPORT the disproportionate confiscation of their wages.
George Bush supports progressive taxation?
Why? Because he didn't veto every Congressional bill not including a flat-tax? Therefore he believes in progressive taxation?
The same exact day Frank uttered these falsehoods (again while evading a direct question), wire reports were buzzing about George Bush touting Estonia's economic growth and FLAT TAX.
Of all the days in the last six years to misrepresent lie about President Bush's tax philosophy, could Frank have picked a more untimely one?
Too bad Bill didn't have a Captious voice in his hear on this point...
I just had a flashback to Al Gore hyperventilating about global warming in NYC on one of its coldest days on record.
How can Frank say with a straight face that Bush agrees with him on progressive taxation?
Bush lowered the top tax bracket from 39 percent to 35 percent.
Flattening out the tax code at its highest point seems a most peculiar expression of support for progressive taxation.
Then again, answering a question about your personal beliefs with "the whole country believes in..." also confounds most holders of 3-digit IQs.
President Bush also wants to abolish the estate tax which is arguably its most progressive confiscation. Frank and his comrades are not exactly on board with that one.
Let's pause the litany of lies for a second.
Frank's response (re: income redistribution) may span the gamut of pejorative adjectives, but that's not to say there's no logic to his tack. Let me try to illustrate this obliquely.
Often times when Senator John Kerry is interrogated about some policy or gaffe of his, he starts his response some variation of, "We have to do better..." or "I have to do better..."
When any Congressmen admits his and his cohorts' incompetence, the listener will reflexively fall into initial agreement. After that, it's much easier for a John Kerry to evade a question, peddle BS, and unleash more sophisticated propaganda. A few sentences into Kerry's response-turned-monologue, and the audience of Soundbite Nation won't even remember the initial question; at least that's what he's striving for. Worst of all, John Kerry won't seem like such a detestable figure.
I want to give another example before I tie to all together.
Remember a dissembling Greg Mankiw hid behind Alan Greenspan in his call for higher gasoline taxes,
National security. Alan Greenspan called for higher gas taxes recently. "It's a national security issue," he said. It is hard to judge how much high oil consumption drives U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern politics. But Mr. Greenspan may well be right that the gas tax is an economic policy with positive spillovers to foreign affairs.
A Greenspan quote? Is that supposed to bring gravitas? Here's what this is. Greg wanted to trot out his own personal conspiracy theory of oil consumption subsidizing "Middle Eastern politics" - whatever the heck that nebulous animal is. BUT, he lacked the stones to say it himself and opted to mask his tripe in a quote from Yoda.
Barney Frank's use of "the whole country" and "George Bush" is a very LOGICAL DEFLECTION - not fundamentally different than the examples given of John Kerry or Greg Mankiw. In this case, Frank wields President Bush as the Useful Stereotype to burnish his own image.
Bill O'Reilly essentially called Frank a socialist, and graciously gave him a chance to disavow it. Frank then tried to sell himself as mainstream, cut from the same mold as the most powerful and visible capitalist of all - George Bush. All the while Frank indulged in FALSE COMPARISON and demonstrated an infinitely flexible relationship with the truth.
...I would like to see public policies that distribute the wealth more fairly. I'm not talking about taking from the rich and giving to the working classes or poor.
Wow, a fairer distribution of wealth that doesn't involve taking it from those who have it????????
...I am talking about just sharing the increase instead of redistributing.
How can sharing possibly not be considered redistribution?????????
The problem we have now is not that the government isn't doing enough to redistribute to the lower end but that the government is doing too much to redistribute it to the higher end.
The only thing he can be talking about here is the "tax cuts for the rich". When his ostensible co-ideologue George Bush dropped the top income tax rate from 39% to 35% - that is called "redistribution". Huh?
Letting people keep 4% more of the money they earned is a government "redistribution"?
If a guy walks by me and I don't mug him for his wallet, did I then "redistribute" his cash to him?
The problem we have now is not that the government isn't doing enough to redistribute to the lower end...
WHO THE HECK SAID THAT WAS "THE PROBLEM" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can't even say that Frank "bobs and weaves" - at least in the context of tax redistribution. The bell rang, he ran out of the ring, stole the announcer's microphone, and started fulminating from the rafters.
Distortion, deflection, mythological metaphor, vituperation, and outright propaganda all by a man "who came on the show to have a coherent conversation".
Note that Greg Mankiw is proud of his Congressman Barney Frank.
Frank was recently re-elected in the gerrymandered 4th District of Massachusetts. He ran unopposed.
If you can't or didn't watch the YouTube clip at the top, make sure you find the time to do so; it's highly illuminating.
Note that decreased supply is not helping prices one bit. Also failing to help are plummeting mortgage rates, a full 70 basis points lower than in June.
Gee, I wonder how the housing market will handle an uptick in interest rates?
Or a potential jump in energy bills?
If house prices keep dropping, perhaps your local municipality will quickly move to lower your property assessment and/or taxes?
Devil's Advocate - Lower taxes? Surely you jest. But what would be the bull argument for the housing sector today?
Massive wage growth. A soaring stock market. And to a lesser extent, declining property taxes and lower energy costs - two possibilities that I think can safely be rejected.
Despite the unrelenting agitprop, wages have been rising for a while. I still feel like they were higher back in 1999 - but maybe that's just my Wall Street bias rearing its head. Now if you believe in a direct correlation between income levels and real estate prices, just for kicks, go research the value of your house back in 1999, a time of perhaps frothier wages.
In 1999 the median home price in America was $125,000.
The United States median price was at approximately $213,000 as of year-end 2005. This is 48.5% higher than the previous housing boom peak of an inflation-adjusted $143,400 in 1989.
So let's see, the nominal median house price is up 70% from the 1999 median. College tuitions cost much more, healthcare costs a lot more, food, energy, cable bills, postage, etc. Just about everything outside of televisions, cell phones, and computers costs more today than in 1999. We'd need much higher personal incomes in order to justify today's sky-high housing market.
Of course interest rates are much lower now than ever before, so housing inflation is not as high as it looks. The question is, how much of the froth is justified by the lower rates?
Here's a chart of historical mortgage rates. Look at 1999.
Mortgage rates started 1999 at 7% and finished the year at 8%. So lets use 7.5% as a baseline.
The full cost of the median house in 1999, i.e. a 125k mortgage fixed at 7.5% over 30 years,
$874 per month.
But at the end of 2005, the full cost of the median house, i.e. a 213k mortgage fixed at 6.25% over 30 years,
So, even after factoring in lower interest rates, it's abundantly clear that on a payment basis, the median home is still 50% more expensive than it was in 1999.
Devil's Advocate - Why did you use the full value of the house? Doesn't the median homeowner have some equity in the home? Shouldn't the mortgage be less than the total house value?
Absolutely not. If you own a $300,000 home, no matter how much you have mortgaged, that is still the amount of capital tied up that you could otherwise be earning interest on. For example, if you have 150k in equity and 150k in mortgage debt, that equity money is asleep, and could be earning interest at market rates. Today it would annually earn at least $6,000 in a money market. The lost interest income is an opportunity cost of homeownership. This is a real estate subtlety thoroughly underappreciated by the investing public.
Take me for example. Since I kept moving (four cities in the last 6 years) I never bought a house. So I am sitting on a lot of cash and will probably have to break down and buy a house soon. Right now I am getting 4% in money markets. Should rates rise to say 7%, 8%, or higher, clearly home prices will get smacked and one would think that I'd be licking my chops for this scenario to buy a discounted home and get settled.
But, if I could earn 8%, 9%, or higher on my cash, I'll be very reluctant to dump my income-earning mound of cash into a house. Heck, bond yields topped 15% twenty-five years ago - not exactly a return to be belittled.
Okay, back to historical house prices. Consider the chart below.
You absolutely have to click here and view the chart enlarged.
Note it's not often that I cite material found in the forever apocalyptic New York Times. This is a real hockey stick graph (not like the global warming propaganda).
I have long believed that the internet bubble never really popped, it just morphed into a real estate bubble. I just read that in Shiller's book Irrational Exublerance, Second Edition he posited the same hypothesis.
Since July, I have been having a local real estate broker email me home listings from a handful of towns off the Mass Pike. The prices today are cheaper than a few months ago, and also down a notch from 2005 but my gut keeps telling me that homes are still just way too pricey - and my blog research (like this) confirms that in spades.
$800,000 for 3000 square feet in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts?
Are you kidding me?
How far do I see the housing market falling?
I don't know....but at least 25% from today's prices.
Forget for a moment all of the conventional terms used to analyze the housing market: demand, supply, immigration, wages, mortgage rates, inflation, interest rates, etc.
I declare the most important variable for the housing market is price momentum.
The housing market rally has been fueled primarily by its own price appreciation.
It's demise will also be story of price momentum. A descending housing market will push mortgage rates higher - which will itself aggravate prices further. Fossils in New England will get less selling their drafty old home up north and have less to spend in Florida's Del Boca Vista. As South Florida cools, so too will Orlando, the Panhandle, Georgia, and the Carolinas. There will be no escape.
Then it will really get ugly. Perhaps the bond market crashes. Congress raises taxes on income or capital gains. Oil hits $100 per barrel...
That picture is worth much more than a thousand words.
Properly digested it could save you thousands of dollars.
