Wall Street Journal on Real Estate Collapse: “Demolish some of the least-wanted houses, with taxpayer money if necessary”
March 26th, 2008Via: Wall Street Journal:
Let us step back. A great deal of housing debt was created in the last few years to give speculative buyers nominal title to homes that they no longer want. Any postmortem will also show that too much government subsidy for the creation of housing debt was an original sin at the root of today’s mess. The result is not unlike pollution — a market “externality” that imposes unfair costs on others as a result of some people’s over-speculation in now decaying, market-depressing, neighborhood-degrading housing.
When politicians understand this, they may finally have something useful to contribute. The shortest road back from this perdition, as improbable as it may sound, would be to foreclose on and demolish some of the least-wanted houses, with taxpayer money if necessary.
US is being sold off.
http://www.economyincrisis.org/
Sound recording industries 97%
Commodity contracts dealing 79%
Motion picture and sound recording 75%
Metal ore mining 65%
Motion picture and video industries 64%
Wineries and distilleries 64%
Database, directory, and other publishers 63%
Book publishers 63%
What kind of a fucked up idea is this?? Demolish “extra” housing – when thousands and thousands of people are homeless, living under bridges and in “tent cities”?? Why not take the opportunity to put a roof over the heads of the homeless for once?
My father would be rolling over in his grave if he read something of this “caliber” in the Wall Street Journal. My Dad born 3/19/10 adored the Wall Street Journal. But then it was a NEWS paper in his time.
I subsribed to the WSJ for several years after my economics professor advised to do so. But during the run up to the war in Iraq, etc, this paper lost its shiny gloss for me. The people who were given print and the sheer gall of the editorial page made me sick.I think the last and best editorial printed in the Wall Street Journal was Wilson’s article: What I Didn’t Find. And then the world as he knew it chewed up his wife, her life and his.
Murdoch is already showing his face in his new acquisition. The WSJ sadly, has just shown me that it is truly trash. Joining the ranks of all the other “news” rags.
My regrets to those who used to bring us the news in the WSJ. I’m looking for a new job too.
So I understand.
They actually did stuff like this during the Great Depression. Faced with deflation, the government under FDR ordered food crops destroyed, on the theory that declining prices were a result of surplus.
Elderly neighbors who lived through the Depression told me that truckloads of apples were dumped into the Missouri River while people were going hungry.
Look for more of this kind of insanity, as the crisis spreads and deepens. As freeacre says, the destruction of housing is an abomination, while people are homeless–as much so as destroying food while people are hungry.