***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

Clearly a money issue..

 

[mplsdunk]

Yeah, I agree. Instead of firing racist police we should make the tax payers give them money to train the racism away.

 

[dinyc3st]

still coked out I see....

 

[Nike Jordan]

 

[IATT]

 

[Mark Antony]

 

[IATT]

 

[Mark Antony]

America first?

 

[elpablo21]

Damn libs and their cancel culture

 

[RustyShackleford]

The NYT published another article about how migration out of Cali is pushing cities toward having housing crises. The main takeaway is that is a national problem, not one has made the proper adjustments to fix the issue. And I think it summed up how NIMBYISM takes different forms in liberal and conservative spaces quite well....

The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis. (Published 2021)

Is it possible to import growth without also importing housing problems? “I can’t point to a city that has done it right.”

www.nytimes.com

Statistically speaking, Idaho is one of America’s greatest economic success stories. The state has low unemployment and high income growth. It has expanded education spending while managing to shore up budget reserves. Brad Little, the state’s Republican governor, has attributed this run of prosperity to the mix of low taxes and minimal regulation that conservatives call “the business climate.”

But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.

Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?
“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.

That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.

Housing costs are relative, of course, so anyone leaving Los Angeles or San Francisco will find almost any other city to have a bountiful selection of homes that seem unbelievably large and cheap. But for those tethered to the local economy, the influx of wealthier outsiders pushes housing costs further out of reach.

According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.

Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville. Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, found that out-of-towners had a home buying budget that was 50 percent higher than locals.Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times

Frustrating as this is for prospective home buyers, the real pain is felt among low-income tenants, a quarter of whom — about 11 million U.S. households — are already spending more than half their pretax income on rent. As rising costs filter through the market and the rent burden gets more severe, food budgets get squeezed, families double up and the most vulnerable end up on the streets.

In city after city, studies have shown that homelessness has a distinct financial tipping point. As soon as the local rent burden reaches the point where renters on average spend more than a third of their income on housing, the number of people on the streets starts to rise sharply, according to researchers at Zillow and elsewhere.

Cities are built around jobs, and the nation’s inequality reflects that. In a trend that has been exhaustively documented by economists and journalists, over the past four decades the U.S. economy has bifurcated into high-paying jobs in fields like tech and finance and low-paying jobs in retail and personal services. It could be described as two separate societies, but in U.S. metropolitan areas these societies are intertwined.

This is as true in Boise as it is in San Francisco. Some work has to be done in person. No matter how high housing costs get, there is not, as of yet, a way to telecommute to a cleaning job. So unless the hordes of expatriate Californians flocking to cheaper cities expect their children to be in remote school forever, to never again eat at a restaurant, to always tidy their own homes — and unless companies leaving California expect to do without the services of janitors and security guards — the underlying problem will persist in every next city that has the misfortune of becoming desirable.

Scholars started documenting California’s affordable housing crisis in the mid-1970s, and since then liberal and conservative economists have identified stringent zoning regulations and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics as leading causes of the nation’s housing problem. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken up the NIMBY issue. Jack Kemp, the secretary of housing and urban development for the first President George Bush, convened a housing advisory commission whose 1991 report was called “Not in My Back Yard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing.”

President Barack Obama spoke against “rules that stand in the way of building new housing” in a speech in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump, echoing Mr. Bush, signed an executive order in 2019 establishing a White House council on affordable housing. (Mr. Trump reversed course a year later, ending an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in the suburbs.)

The problem is that opposition to new housing also has bipartisan agreement. Blue cities full of people who say they want a more equitable society consistently vote to push housing costs onto others. They will vote for higher taxes to fund social programs, but also make sure that whatever affordable housing does get built is built far away from them. Red suburbs full of people who say regulation should be minimal and property rights protected insist that their local governments legislate a million little rules that dictate what can be built where. What does it mean to respect property rights? In zoning fights, it gets fuzzy.

“Normally we think of ownership as determining who has a right to use a piece of property in a certain way,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But when a city tries to add density, she said, it’s common to see this framed “as harming the property rights of people who could experience changes in their neighborhood.”

It’s a distant memory now, but in the weeks before the pandemic shut down the economy, housing policy was having a minor political moment. The field of Democratic presidential candidates, including President Biden, had released a flurry of federal housing proposals that varied in their particulars but revolved around a series of tax breaks, affordable housing funds and promises to encourage intransigent local governments to make it easier to build.

The track record of previous administrations suggests that the federal government can accomplish only so much. That’s why Dr. Hamilton, who closely follows local housing policies, is encouraged that there are also a flurry of proposals coming out of state and local governments.

In 2018 the City Council in Minneapolis voted to outlaw the practice of declaring some neighborhoods off limits for apartment buildings — what’s known as single-family zoning — becoming the first major U.S. city to do so. Since then, a half-dozen states have introduced bills to limit single-family zoning. Various others have passed laws to prevent cities from banning backyard cottages and require them to permit more apartments. Ms. McLean, the mayor of Boise, recently started an effort to rewrite the city’s zoning code.

The action might be local, but the message should carry nationwide: The only way to solve the housing crisis is to address it in every city it visits. Otherwise, we’re just spreading it around.

In regards to housing, I feel going after San Fran, LA and NYC are easy targets, easy targets because **** has been bubbling for decades (before liberals had unified control of these areas) and finally **** hit the fan first there.

Urban economists often has to run models with the two cities (especially NYC) because they appear as outliers in the data.

Look at the explosion in housing prices in MSAs that Californians are moving to...

NYC, San Fran, and LA's charts look pretty much the same. But those areas were starting from higher floors already.

Besides the biggest examples falling in Dem areas. I do believe that the promise of progressivism is that it aims to tackles big issues, and since it is not solving the big issues, it reflects extra poorly on left-wing politicians. Right-wingers provide bad governance all over the country, yet their failures are not given as much attention, and they are just a few decades behind having the same issue Cali has. I think blue voters and red voters end up in the same ****** up place for slightly different reasons.

So yes, states like Cali and New York need to do better, MUCH BETTER, but we should go overboard in painting the issues that are unique to them.

 

[IATT]

 

[RustyShackleford]

A follow up on the California discussion we had in here last week because of that Kelin article. The more I thought about it the more I felt Ezra Klein's article made a really weak argument.

David Dayen pulled his card on Twitter too...









Ezra to his credit took the criticism to heart and expanded on his point, but I felt he also moved the goal post (he moved it onto a better criticism)

Klein's response...

 

[RustyShackleford]

Cont.

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1359963605353963520

This argument I definitely agree more with. The progressive veto ****s **** up more than folk realize. The problem is not that there is a do-nothing consensus.

Some people want progress, but within that coalition, they are more people that will destroy a program if they feel they have to pay part of the cost, and are too ideologically rigid.

 

[IATT]

 

[stuntman mike]

 

[IATT]

Seems like a financing issue..

 

[IATT]

 

[kdawg]

still coked out I see....

I saw Trumpty's lawyer parroting this over and over at the weekend - but does anyone know the truth of it? I tried to search but ended up on some right wing site where they were baying for a beheading or something.

It's clearly not as big a deal as what the Rs do consistently - but do we know where it came from? Was it like the photo that had something 'shopped into the background which didn't change the substance but made the right say that it was inadmissable?

 

[kdawg]

when "stat news" can't interpret basic statistics, what hope do we have for the general population?

I have a problem with this though - and it's to do with messaging from the beginning of this. In most cases a test is irrelevant - everyone should know that you can be asymptomatic and contagious and can also become infected up to at least 10 days following exposure - and before that time you would test negative.

Testing is important - but it is only important in symptomatic people - anyone else who has been exposed to someone who was symptomatic/positive needs to be quarantining to avoid the spread - and the state of the US (and the UK, England in particular) is testament to that.

One branch of my family is from the mountains of Virginia/Alabama and they're not the sharpest. There was a family funeral recently which none of my family went to (thankfully). The husband of the deceased got a call midway through the funeral (which he answered!) saying that his test results came back and he was positive. His kids had been staying with him for about a week before (which was reasonable in the circumstances - I don't criticise that) but then drove home from Ohio to Alabama stopping at restaurants and a car dealer for a minor repair...

She bleated about needing a test for the next few days then about a week later developed symptoms. That is a good example IMO that she should have seen no-one after being exposed to her father until 10 days had passed without symptoms (although she then got symptoms so it would be longer). That would limit the spread more than anything.

I'm not saying that testing isn't important - but the previous administration thought it was more important than proper protocols to limit the spread - like wearing a mask and effective quarantine.

The one thing the UK has done which is incredibly stupid is just introduce mandatory quarantine for those arrivng from overseas - like Australia. I agree with that completely - I just can't believe it took nearly a year!

 

[Nike Jordan]

 

[gry60]

More than 6,500 Connecticut voters have left the Republican Party since Election Day. That’s a nearly 300% increase compared to after the 2016 election.

Joel Schiavone, a longtime Republican from New Haven who twice ran for office and who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, says he’s done with the GOP. “It was a long time brewing,…

www.courant.com

I'm sure there are similar stories in other states. I'm curious to know if there are examples of the GOP growing in some states.

 

[biggie62]

More than 6,500 Connecticut voters have left the Republican Party since Election Day. That’s a nearly 300% increase compared to after the 2016 election.

Joel Schiavone, a longtime Republican from New Haven who twice ran for office and who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, says he’s done with the GOP. “It was a long time brewing,…

www.courant.com

I'm sure there are similar stories in other states. I'm curious to know if there are examples of the GOP growing in some states.

Im more interested in red states it this is occurring. It doesn’t move any needles when it occurs in a deep blue state.

 

[IATT]

 

[had pants]