Monday, February 07, 2011

Dos Cosas (Two Things)

First, Obama is trying to tell us that "If we're fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports, the benefits cannot just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that opening markets will lift their standard of living as well as your bottom line." Clearly, this is a redistribution scheme. He didn't say it should be done through legislation but isn't that was he's really all about? Years ago, he expressed the opinion that the Supreme Court should have ruled, as part of the civil rights hearings that they should have taken a bigger role in the redistribution of wealth. The government has been redistributing wealth for years. They take it from the middle class and give it to the poor (or seemingly poor) through social programs and to the rich through bailouts, loans, tax favors, regulations, etc. The middle class gets screwed and is stuck paying the bills for both sides.

Secondly, the mayor of Detroit is peddling a program to get cops and firefighters to move back to the city by offering them refurbished houses for $1000. Detroit has turned in to a wasteland. Using the scarce funds they have available to subsidize housing for government employees is a horrible waste. Also, the 47% of police and firefighters who are living in the city and paying rent or mortgages have to keep doing what they're doing. How many of these police and firefighters are going to buy these houses, rent them to friends and relatives, but list it as their home address while maintaining their actual residence outside the city? There will be a lot of that. The city is dying, they should just let it die. Entire neighborhoods are being abandoned. The median home price in the city of Detroit is $5700 (no, that's not missing a zero). Formerly multi-million dollar homes are up for sale at 10% of their original cost. Skyscrapers downtown are completely abandoned. I think at some point in the near future, they need to just plow the city under and leave the ground fallow for 7 years and then homestead it again. Leftist policies destroyed the city. Let's remake the city as a new experiment in libertarian ideals, free from most government restraint. A group of billionaires could form a coalition to buy the entire city and privatize it.

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