Here’s an article from the NYTimes — front page of the Home and Garden section, no less — which discusses families (pretty darned affluent ones at that) having made lots of paper equity on their homes in the last few years, and no place to spend it when they outgrow or out-desire their current places. So maybe they make 100% profit on their investment, but find they still can’t afford an upgrade within their geographical areas. I’ve been posting about the need to create more housing to soak up the high demand, but bubbles are immune to ordinary supply/demand patterns. The extra demand that creates the bubble is partly from speculation, which makes it tough on folks who actually want someplace to live for an extended period of time. Really, one solution to the bubble is for other, less expensive places (Cleveland, Buffalo) to make themselves attractive somehow to people in the expensive areas, as with the couple in the article that moved to Montreal (a terrific place, by the way). Otherwise we may see the "Manhattanization" of entire markets like here and San Francisco, where folks pay higher and higher prices and hold lower and lower expectations because, well, [...]
Disgraced ex-aide to Hatch and Frist defends the Federalist Society, makes nice with former boss
Today’s "Opinion Journal," the Wall Street Journal’s on-line collection of far-right opinion pieces, contains a hilarious piece by Manuel Miranda. It’s about the Federalist Society, which as you may recall is the conservative legal group of which Supreme Court nominee John Roberts may or may not be a member, he can’t seem to recall. Miranda says that the White House should have defended the Federalist Society instead of trying to distance themselves from it, that the Society isn’t really so bad, blah blah blah nobody cares. Why is this so hilarious? It’s all about the context. Let’s recall who this Miranda guy is. A couple of years ago, it became known that due to a "glitch" in Capitol Hill’s computer systems, the Senate Democrats’ strategy memos were readily available to Senate Republicans. An aide to then-Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) of the Senate Judiciary Committee leaked some of those memos to the press as part of a strategy to counter the Senate Democrats’ tactics with respect to some of Bush’s judicial nominees. The aide, who later joined Majority Leader Bill Frist’s staff, was Manuel Miranda. After the Senate’s Sergeant-at-Arms investigated, Miranda was exposed and finally was forced to resign – by [...]
