Communism

Fair taxes?

Read this article, and laugh with me. They claim that what makes a tax fair is people pay in proportion to the amount of use they get out of roads.

The gas tax was fair because it was based on a simple principle: user pays, user benefits. Before the gas tax, all taxpayers paid for the upkeep of roads and building new ones. But this was particularly unfair to the poorest people who could not afford a car.

They go on to then admit that the tax isn’t about revenue- it’s about punishing the rich.

Originally introduced as a fair way for automobile drivers to pay for the upkeep of the roads they use, it has become less fair as rich people buy hybrid and electric vehicles.

They go on and on about those people who aren’t poor.

This unfairness is compounded by the fact that hybrid or electric vehicle (EV) owners are likely to be well-educated, young, and comparatively well-off. A study by TrueCar.com, for example, found that the average owner of a Ford Focus Electric had a household income of $199,000 a year. The people who are paying the most for road upkeep are more likely to be less well-educated, older, and poorer than the hybrid/EV owners.

So poor people don’t benefit from roads? Obama claimed that business owners “didn’t build that” because all of society made business possible because infrastructure is paid for by all. Doesn’t that also mean that everyone is responsible to pay for that infrastructure?

Since electric cars do just as much damage to roads as gas-powered cars, we will still need to spend just as much on maintaining roads in a world with electric cars as we do today. Also, as long as most of the electricity is still coming from fossil fuels, we should want the tax to discourage driving in general.

Nope- just more communism sneaking into our political landscape.

By Divemedic, ago

Dysfunction?

The Washington Post says that the eviction moratorium is displaying the failure of the system in this country for renting houses.

When a property owner rents the property that he owns to another, he is doing so because he wants to make money. It doesn’t matter if that property is a saw, a car, or even a home. The owner buys the property and lets the renter use that property for an amount of time in exchange for money. It’s just that simple. Let’s look at a residential rental.

  • The property owner offers to rent a home to someone. This is called the offer.
  • The renter signs an agreement, agreeing to pay money (or sometimes other commodities) in exchange for living there. This is the acceptance.
  • The renter pays the money, the owner lets the tenant live there. Consideration.

What happens when the renter lives there, but doesn’t pay? The property owner loses money and must get the renter to move out so that he can rent it to someone who will actually pay. Any property owner would rather collect the money he is owed than evict, because eviction is an expensive thing to do.

The Post claims that the trials are unfair because the property owner wins the majority of the time. I don’t see how that is a problem. If the tenant signed the lease, lived in the rental property, and didn’t pay, there are very few defenses that would let him continue to live there for free.

The Post wants the US to declare that housing is a human right. So if it is a right, who is to provide it? The only answer is the complete elimination of private property in this country.

Communism.

By Divemedic, ago

Finally

Today is finally the day that most American landlords can begin getting rid of the people who have been stealing their property. That’s right, the eviction moratorium is finally going to be allowed to expire. The Biden administration refused to extend it and even the Communist wing of the Democrat party couldn’t muster the votes in Congress to make it a law.

For some landlords, it has been YEARS since they were paid a cent in compensation for the use of the property that they purchased and were still required to maintain, insure, and pay taxes on, while the government refused to intervene as people were living there for free, even while destroying the place.

In the beginning, it was the government who created the problem- they forced everyone to stay home, which caused businesses to shut down, some permanently. What began as “two weeks to flatten the curve” became “until there is a vaccine.” Then the government mailed out billions in free money, paid billions more in enhanced unemployment benefits, all the while telling people that they didn’t have to pay rent because evictions were prohibited.

Instead of paying their bills, many Americans went on a shopping spree. Amazon, Netflix, and other companies saw record profits. Many businesses, including landlords, were bearing the costs of this orgy of spending. A year and a half later, and people are now upset that the evictions are coming, as if landlords are the villains.

Yes, landlords are being made into the villain here. Read this piece from Politico. They claim that 12 million people are behind on rent, including 50 percent of all black families. The article blames landlords for that, pointing out that  Forty-eight percent of voucher holders are Black and 18 percent are Hispanic, so the refusal to accept vouchers is a coded form of racial discrimination, in other words, calling landlords racist. Why?

The reasons that many landlords, myself included, don’t accept government Section 8 vouchers is purely financial.

  • People who are poor have poor rental payment histories and are likely to default
  • People who are paying for things with someone else’s money don’t value the things that the money bought, because they didn’t have to work for it
  • the government puts too many restrictions on the landlord, including more paperwork, more bureaucratic administrative burden, and more headaches. All in exchange for taking less money

All of the above increases my financial risk, my workload, and decreases my income. The only way to make money with Section 8 is to buy cheap, shitty, substandard housing. In other words, be a slum lord. I don’t want to do that, so I avoid Section 8.

The fact that most people who are receiving Section 8 housing vouchers are black has nothing to do with it. I am not in business to do people favors, I am in business to make the most money that I can by doing the least amount of work and taking the smallest risk that I possibly can. If I could make money selling goods to black people by taking little risk and expending minimum effort, I would do so. The money just isn’t there.

That isn’t enough. Some governments have made it illegal to discriminate against those who are receiving Section 8 vouchers. The latest effort is a push to get banks behind an effort to refuse loans to landlords unless they agree to rent to low income, Section 8 recipients. This will drive more landlords out of the market, especially smaller ones, leaving nothing but larger, self funded landlords in the market.

This is a push for the removal of the entrepreneur from the American experience.

By Divemedic, ago

Communism in disguise

I want you to look at this cartoon from a California school system.

One thing that is completely ignored by this cartoon is that the three people peering over the fence are watching the game without having paid for admission. In other words, the three in the picture are stealing the labor of the baseball players, in that they are receiving their labor without having paid for it.

Even ignoring that, this is a poor example. In economics, there are no boxes that people can stand on. The additional height that is provided by the box must come from somewhere. A more accurate creation of the differences would be to dig a hole under the tall person’s feet, and use the fill dirt to create a mound upon which the others would then stand.

With all of that, this ‘equity’ movement is being taught to our children. It is being forced upon us through corporate culture. Overly simplified, it ignores reality in favor of a pipe dream where everyone gets to watch free baseball. In other words, our schools are teaching communism. Sure, they will deny it, but that is the essence of communism.

They begin with a premise: that some group or another is the recipient of an unfair advantage. Let’s call that group the bourgeoisie. They have an unfair advantage in that they own the means of producing and creating wealth and are concerned with the value of their property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy. In other words, they have made it and are now using the laws of society to keep everyone else from making it. They have gotten rich and are staying rich by ensuring that poor people stay poor.

They do this through two means:

  • One group of the bourgeoisie steals wealth by forcing the workers to build things for low wages (employers).
  • The second group of the bourgeoisie steals wealth by charging the workers rent for either property (landlords) or money (bankers).

Let’s contrast them with the second group: Let’s call them the proletariats. The proletariat are forced to accept low wages in return for operating the means of production, which belong to business owners, the bourgeoisie. In this way, the bourgeoisie steal the property of the proletariat by forcing them to work for low wages, then taking those wages away by charging interest and rent for property that they own.

Now let’s mix in a racial component to make the picture complete. The white man is the source of all of the troubles of POC. You see, whites stole this land from the peace loving POC, then through the use of slavery, built the entire nation. Now that they are all bourgeoisie, the whites have set up this system to keep themselves rich, and the proletariat poor.

The only way to fix this, is to place whites at a disadvantage to the point where we all can watch the baseball game together. Does this sound familiar? It sounds remarkably like the speeches of Adolf Hitler, who blamed the Jews for all of the problems of the Aryan Nation.

I have seen this movie before. It always ends with box cars and systemic extermination of the bourgeoisie. Make no mistake, the war has begun. Whether you want it or not, it’s here.

As for me, I won’t be loaded into a box car, nor will my wife.

I leave you with the words of the rock band Rush:

The end was begun, it would hit everyone
When the chain reaction was done
The big shots try to hold it back
Fools try to wish it away
The hopeful depend on a world without end
Whatever the hopeless may say

By Divemedic, ago

Extended, again

Emperor Biden has again extended the CDC eviction ban, this time through July 31. They claim that this is the final time it will be extended. I am not holding my breath.

This is royally screwing landlords. I will use Orange County, Florida (the location of Orlando) as an example. As a landlord, the qualifications are:

  • Waive all late fees, penalties and interest related to the tenant’s past-due rent
  • Accept payment made pursuant to this program as full and complete payment by the tenant for all past-due rent and associated fees accrued and owed.
  • Release the tenant from any obligation to pay any rent accrued and owed that exceeds the amount of the program payment
  • Withdraw any eviction and collections actions that they, or one of their agents or associates, filed against the tenant for failure to pay rent and associated fees owed.
  • They must agree to comply with the terms and conditions of this program, including the submission of any documentation requested by the County to confirm and verify the program application.

So, why is this screwing landlords? Keep in mind that evictions have been banned since April 2020. The funds paid will do the following:

  • Cover a tenant’s documented past-due rent only for the time period beginning on April 1, 2020 to present and up to one-month prospective rent and up to one-month prospective rent;
  • Assistance can be provided for up to 12 months of arrears in past-due rent and one month of prospective rent not to exceed a maximum of $20,000. NOTE: One-month prospective rent cannot be provided if rental arrears are $20,000 or more.)

The eviction moratorium has been in place for 16 months, because April 2020 was 16 months ago. As soon as you take the money, you are not permitted to go after the tenant for another dime.

That means any apartment that was renting for more than $1,660 a month, or more than a year, or including late fees means accepting less than was owed. Also, if the lease specifies that the tenant pay things like utilities, trash removal, yard waste, or any other fees, those are not covered by the program, even though Florida law says the landlord has to provide them if the tenant doesn’t pay for them. You can’t sue them.

The average rent in the Orlando area is $1,500 a month for a two bedroom. If a tenant had stopped paying rent in April, they would be $24,000 in arrears as of July 1. Now the program only pays for 12 months of back rent, so the maximum paid would be $18,000. The landlord is out $6,000. To add insult to injury, since the payment is considered full and complete, the landlord must even return the security deposit.

This is why landlords say that it is killing them. This entire thing is government sanctioned theft. The majority of the nation’s landlords are individual investors, like my wife and me. One in four of these individual investor-landlords has a tenant that is behind in rent. By inserting itself into private contracts, the government has stolen our property simply because it wants to.

Why are they doing this? Make no mistake, this isn’t about COVID. No, the disease is just the excuse. Read this story and understand. The subject of the story is RETIRED. Here is the reason:

He and his wife have never been evicted. However, insufficient retirement savings, difficulty in getting rehired and a lack of affordable housing have left many older Americans especially vulnerable to financial shocks like the one from the pandemic.

How would COVID hurt a retired person? It isn’t like they lost their job. They have been living in rented homes for over a year without having to pay rent, can’t waste money by going out. No, this is a pure money grab, yet landlords are the ones being called greedy.

Now the LA Sheriff wants the state of California to declare a state of emergency, so that government officials can use the authority granted thereby to seize homes for the homeless.

This is communism. Pure and simple. It is tyranny, it is unconstitutional. Claiming that people need housing so landlords must provide it at their expense is no different than using the same reason to force restaurants or farmers to give away free food. This is abject slavery.

The Democrats want to give away free college, free homes, free health care, what next? Who will be next to bear the burden of this government?

By Divemedic, ago

Brown Shirts

A huge investigation carried out by the FBI and other Federal law enforcement into the Capitol incident of January 6 has so far netted 465 arrests with an additional 250 people wanted for various charges. The only death connected to the event was an unarmed woman killed by a police officer.

Contrast that to last summer’s violence where over a hundred deaths and BILLIONS of dollars in damages were directly caused by rioters who established entire areas that were claimed to be “autonomous zones” existing outside of government authority. Those protests saw nearly all of the charges being dropped.

The organization err idea that caused mush of the damage and violence continues to harass and attack American citizens, in some cases with the active support and cooperation of law enforcement.

Why is all of this happening? Because getting the people to overthrow local authority is how China did it.

By Divemedic, ago

Theft

This is another post about the blatant theft of property that has been occurring in this country: the government is forcing property owners to fund their lockdowns by demanding that they provide free housing. The latest in these stories is this one from California.

The homeowner in this case isn’t some “evil” megacorporation. When she moved in with her boyfriend, she decided to rent out her beachfront condo in order to cover the mortgage, tax, and other expenses.

The tenant in this case hasn’t paid rent in over 14 months, and has been subletting the property, and even listing it on AirBNB as a vacation rental, despite the fact that all of that is prohibited by the lease. A new law passed in May says that landlords can only evict tenants if they pose an imminent threat to health or safety, leaving landlords with no recourse or means of collecting any past due rents.

Slate jumps on the bandwagon by claiming “million of tenants will lose ‘their homes'” when the eviction moratorium expires, completely ignoring the fact that the properties aren’t the tenants’ homes in the first place. The Slate article goes on to claim that there is government money available for landlords to be made whole, but many landlords are refusing to accept the money, thereby making the landlords look mean.

The reason why that money is a bad deal for landlords is that, like most government plans, the money comes with strings attached. The deal is that the property owner has to sign a contract accepting the government funds as a complete settlement of ALL monies due. If the tenant moves out and the property has tens of thousands of dollars in damages- too bad. You can’t report the tenant’s history and failure to pay rent to anyone.

I will quote Slate now:

Eviction should not be the solution to every landlord problem, even though that has been an underlying assumption in the United States for a very long time. We are comparing a choice that someone makes to start a business venture with a fundamental right and need for shelter just to exist as a human being—and I think we need to stop equating those two things. (emphasis added)

Do you see what they are claiming? A person has a right to a place to live, even at the expense of someone else. This is communist bullshit. The ultimate goal here is that property owners will be forced to provide free homes to anyone who claims a need.

I simply can’t see how this is NOT a violation of the takings clause. So far, the courts are taking the position that an eviction moratorium doesn’t deprive the property owner of their property because the rent is still due, even though there is no mechanism in place to allow for the collection of rent.

I see no difference between this and requiring a restaurant to feed people on demand. What else do they want for free? This “eliminate rent” movement is the first step towards destroying our economy and replacing it with communism. This is class warfare, pure and simple.

Poor people and minorities are primarily the people who rent homes. Whites and more affluent people own their homes. Race and class are being used to destroy home ownership.

By Divemedic, ago

NJ socializes property

The New Jersey governor just signed a law which extends the state’s eviction moratorium to January of 2022. This means that owners of residential rental property in New Jersey have not collected rent in nearly two years. At what point is this an unconstitutional taking of private property for public use?

The only way out for these property owners is either bankruptcy, which means the state gets the property, or a mysterious fire, which gets the owner an insurance check.

By Divemedic, ago