Gimme Shelter

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #884
10/25/2023
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1) Gimme Shelter
Under Biden, the dream of homeownership is becoming an impossible dream for many in the middle class. Worse yet, young families that CAN afford a new home, can only buy a house that is half the price tag of homes that were within their financial reach three years ago.

When Trump left office, the typical family could afford to buy a home valued at $725,000. Now that same median-income family can only afford a home priced $365,000 – according to an NBC News analysis based on federal housing data.

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The monthly payment on a 30-year mortgage has ballooned from $1,403 in 2020 to $2,441 now. This means over the life of a mortgage, the extra interest payments due to higher interest rates under Biden will well exceed $300,000.

Here’s another depressing way to look at how Biden has wrecked housing affordability. The median-income home buyer can’t afford to buy a median-value home.

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The major culprit is the escalation of mortgage interest rates from a low of 2.68% in Trump’s last year in office, to 7.8% some 32 months later.

Something has to give here. Either housing values are going to plummet or homeownership rates in America are going to continue to tank.

But if you listen to Biden talk about the economy, you’d think these were the days of wine and roses for the middle class.

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2) Send in the Clowns
This just in: Republicans have a new flavor of the day in the Speaker’s race: Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson seems fine to us. He’s a fiscal conservative and right on most of the economic issues (as far as we can tell). But count us skeptical that Johnson or ANYONE can get 217 votes in these crazy new rules for electing a speaker.

We ran this humor item a week ago in the HOTLINE showing the floor of the House of Representatives inside the Capitol – filled with clowns. They didn’t get the message. One of our readers even commented that this cartoon was an insult to clowns.

The House GOP is contorted into the shape of a pretzel right now and at a time when we have a hapless President who seems to screw up everything he touches, Republicans somehow look even less ready for prime time right now.

Back in 1974 when both President Nixon and Vice President Agnew resigned and the country was in turmoil, Bill Buckley proposed that maybe the president should be a wildly popular and proven winner that the country could truly rally behind: triple crown winner Secretariat.

Most conservatives would like to see Johnson's policies prevail. But, the nightmare scenario is that this never-ending charade will only be resolved with Repubs choosing a C-list/least common denominator Speaker. At a time of great economic and national security peril when we need a General Eisenhower running the House, we are on track to get a Speaker Gomer Pyle…and then 18 months from now a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.

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3) Bay State Tax Blues After a “Millionaires Tax” Passes
Last year, Massachusetts voters narrowly and foolishly approved a “millionaires tax”, which raised the state tax rate on income above $1 million from 5% to 9%.

Now the floodgates have opened. Governor Maura Healey has just proposed a new tax that would allow towns to impose a transaction fee of 0.5 percent to 2 percent on the portion of a property sale over $1 million. In Greater Boston, about one-fifth of all house sales are already above that amount.

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The Tax foundation now ranks Massachusetts 47th in business-friendliness – ahead of only Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. It was 34th as recently as last year.

We’ve mentioned many times that the Northeast has just for the first time ever surrendered its long-standing regional economic supremacy to the southeast. It’s because of these soak-the-rich, tax “progressive” policies that simply make blue states poorer.

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4) The Supreme Court Should Kill the Washington State Capital Gains Tax
Speaking of dumb moves by blue states, Washington state recently enacted its first-ever capital gains tax. The state Supreme Court in Washington State accepted the dubious argument that the state's new capital gains tax doesn't run afoul of the state's constitutional prohibition on income taxes because the lawmakers mangled the English language and called it “an excise tax” imposed on the transaction that generates a capital gain, not the income itself.

Now the plaintiffs in the case have appealed to the US Supreme Court, arguing that if it is an excise, it's a federally unconstitutional tax on out-of-state transactions and thus a clear violation of the commerce clause of the constitution, which prohibits one state from imposing a tax on a transaction outside of its borders.

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As the WSJ notes:

Allowing interstate excise taxes “threatens to wreak havoc on taxpayers and businesses around the country,” as the Washington Policy Center put it in an amicus brief filed Monday. Washington residents already have a headache in figuring out which sales trigger the tax.

A Supreme Court rebuke would remind states to stay in their lanes with taxes and regulations. Perhaps [governor] Inslee and the Legislature couldn’t help themselves, but creativity and lawmaking rarely go together well, and sometimes they run up against the Constitution.

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5) Using Fossil Fuels Makes Nations Richer
The war on fossil fuels could easily be a nefarious plot by the “de-growth” movement by wealthy environmentalists on the left to prevent poor countries from moving their citizens out of poverty and to a path toward greater prosperity. It’s almost immoral that the developed nations are lecturing the poorer countries not to build reliable coal or gas plants and instead build windmills. This is a priority of groups like the World Bank and the UN.

The path to higher living standards is for poor nations to use MORE energy not less. This chart from Robert Bryce again demonstrates that energy poverty leads to material poverty.

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6) The Illogic of EVs

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