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Showing posts from May, 2017

Institutional Doublespeak: An Affair of Palatably-Misleading Nomenclature

In a nutshell, the titular dispositions of the federal government's various programs fail to, by their mere identities and steadily-increasing expenditures, move the dial for those whose interests they purport to promote. The dependency system, as one example, remains largely void of any considerable breadth of empirical evidence to support the notion that their beneficiaries are effectually empowered by the existence of the oft-endorsed and ever-expansive safety nets which subsidize their lives of complacency at the relatively-unseen costs of the unknown that will naturally go unrealized on the occasion of so-called public interest gaining favor while requisitely crowding out the type of investment which might otherwise successfully serve that end. Indeed, their existence systematically deprives the institutionalized citizen of the organic impetus for self-sufficiency, independence and personal sovereignty which attends a sustainable life of dignity and responsibility. The depen...

Affordable Housing Measures Yield Unaffordable Outcomes

As it turns out, the subsidized housing industry is effectively failing to achieve much more than artificially stimulating nominal demand in the rental market, supplying upward pressure to real estate prices that are a function of those rents. The core obstacle to affordable housing is the vicious cycle of increasingly unaffordable units encouraged by government-guaranteed loans and the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy and artificially-low rates of interest which fuel speculation, combined with the regressive zoning laws, regulations and restrictions which oppose the expansion of supply. Sustainable growth in the housing stock follows substantive growth in household income. Otherwise it's purely speculative. In the United States, real median household incomes are roughly 9% below their pre-dot-com-bubble peak, even when using the modest inflation figures of the Federal Reserve. This intimates that the United States real estate market is being exercised as an illuso...