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.

Sue them

I have been talking about evictions and how landlords are being blamed for the problems caused through government malfeasance.

Landlords all over are saying that they are being put out of business because they are not being permitted to remove non paying tenants from their property. The government claims to offer rental assistance, but it is a sham. A year of rent free living often means that tenants owe tens of thousands of dollars in back rent. These rental assistance plans often require that landlords sign an agreement which states that they agree to accept whatever the government sends as full and final payment for all past due rent. So the landlord is expected to accept pennies on the dollar.

Instead, some landlords in New Jersey have found a better way. After fourteen months of watching their money go out without a dime in rent being paid, they have had enough. They can’t evict- but they can sue. They go to court, sue the tenant, and get a judgement for the past due rent.

Such lawsuits do not violate the governor’s eviction moratorium. That has the communists going apoplectic.

“I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the moratorium,” Albert added.

The claimed “Spirit” and legal basis for the moratorium was that people who have been evicted pose a risk for spreading COVID. It is supposedly an infection control measure. Of course, we all know the truth: the eviction moratorium is just another giveaway program- one paid for by property owners.

Communism, isn’t it great?

Employee trouble

My post of this afternoon centered around employees feeling like they are owed something, simply because they had been employees for a long time, even if those employees hadn’t done anything to improve themselves for (in some cases) decades. There is a reason for that post.

I was hired into a management position at a hospital. When I was hired, I got a lot of pushback. It seems that the employees of the department who had been there for a long time were upset that someone was brought in from the outside, and felt that the position should have gone to them, because they had been there for a long time. One employee told me that she felt like her 17 years there meant nothing and that I got that promotion simply because “I rode around in a truck for a few years.” I told her that it wasn’t just my time on an ambulance that mattered. It was my certifications, my four college degrees, my years of experience as a supervisor that landed me that position. I advised her that she should take advantage of our employer’s tuition reimbursement program, so she could be more qualified the next time a promotion became available. She quit a week later.

Other employees told me that they felt like our employer should pay more. I listened and went to management, who told me that they won’t pay more unless the employees gain a skill. I went back to my employees with a deal: I would help them learn the material to take an exam to earn a certification pertinent to our job, and if they passed the exam, our employer would give them a 20% raise. The cost of the exam is $200. I was willing to teach them on my own time.

The employees refused, saying that they would only take the class if they were on the clock, and refused to pay for the exam fees out of their own pocket. So to sum it up, they want a raise, more training, more certifications, and they want their employer to pay for it all. Why would any employer do all of that? It makes no economic sense. It would be cheaper to let you quit and hire more qualified employees.

If employees refuse to make themselves more valuable, how can they expect to make more money?

Wait for the appeal

The courts have finally put a stop to the government forcing landlords to absorb the cost of their unconstitutional lockdowns.

That is good, because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was also getting involved, claiming that collecting the debt from tenants who shafted their landlord was also illegal.

According to the CFPB’s analysis and other data:

Millions of families are at risk of being evicted: In December 2020 about 18 percent of renter households were behind on their rent, which means nearly 9 million households at risk of eviction. In a typical year, there are about 900,000 evictions nationwide. Over 27 percent of households with annual income under $25,000 were behind on their rent.
Stopping evictions saves lives: Research shows that COVID-19 infection rates and mortality rates were higher when eviction moratoria were removed. The CFPB’s rule will help ensure that more renters are able to take advantage of their protections and avoid eviction.
Evictions increase racial inequality: Black and Hispanic households are more than twice as likely to be tenants than white households, and they are also twice as likely to be behind on rental payments as of December 2020, according to a March CFPB report . Evictions impose substantial costs on individuals, families, and children, and having an eviction on your record can make it much harder to find a new rental property. Even an eviction filing can make it impossible for a family to locate new housing.

You see what the real reason is? Blacks are refusing to pay rent at a higher rate than whites, so evictions are racist.

The appeal will come in 3…2…1…

Inflation

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man says that readers claim inflation isn’t here. Let me show you how it sneaks up on you. A Denny’s commercial from 1997:

Note that one of those breakfasts was this one:

2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes. This is the breakfast that Denny’s calls the “Original Grand Slam.” For $1.99.

How much is this breakfast now? $9.29, or 467% more than it was 24 years ago. That works out to an annual inflation rate of 6.7%. The published rates for that period were anything from negative 0.2 all the way to 3.0. The official inflation rates say that this breakfast should only cost $3.28 today.

When I was in high school nearly 40 years ago, I remember being able to go to McDonald’s and eat my fill for less than $4. A Big Mac was only $1.09. Krystal Hamburgers were 25 cents. Compare them to today’s prices.

It isn’t just food. In 1999, you could purchase gasoline for less than $1 a gallon. The hit is even larger than that- because in 2005, Congress mandated that all gasoline be diluted with alcohol.

But wages haven’t kept pace. In 2000, the starting pay for a Paramedic right out of school was $14 an hour. Today, that same new paramedic would start at – $13 an hour.

Prices have been increasing at a rate of 6 to 7 percent per year, while wages have remained static.

Why isn’t the economy getting better?

Restaurants in Florida can’t get enough staff to fully open. Some are so desperate for workers, they are offering signing bonuses of up to $400 for wait staff. It turns out not to only be Florida, and not just restaurants.

So what’s going on? Unemployment is at 6 percent, so it isn’t so low that we have full employment. The labor participation rate is at an all time low- only six out of every ten adults are working.

Why? Because the government is paying people $575 a week to not go to work. That works out to $30,000 a year. But that isn’t all. Unemployment isn’t subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes. This means that a person on unemployment is taking home the equivalent of $32,300 a year. Now we find out that there is a program beginning in July that will pay people another $300 per month per child.

So let’s explain what is going on here: (Sorry about all of the math and numbers)

A pair of parents were working to support their two children. They were both working in the tourism industry in Orlando. Together, they were making $50,000 a year. This made them middle class, putting them in the 43rd percentile. Usually, they worked different days, but would occasionally pay for daycare. In all, day care was costing them about $400 a month. This left them about $3,000 a month.

They were laid off at the start of COVID. Now they are getting unemployment in the amount of $1,150 per week between the two of them. There is no longer a need to pay for child care, and they get to spend all of their time in leisure, instead of working. They now are left with $3,600 a month.

Why would they ever want to return to work? It isn’t COVID that is destroying this nation. It is the government. What we are doing is living off of our credit cards. Sooner or later, the cards will be maxed out and the bill will be due. The powers that be know this. The clock is ticking, and we are running out of money and time. What is coming will have to happen before we are out of money.

Killing the rental market

There is a nationwide eviction moratorium. There is a push to eliminate security deposits. It sounds great, but now the landlord has to file a claim for any damages done to the property by the tenant. This increases costs and risk to the landlord.

Now the newest thing is laws that prohibit credit checks, using a prospective tenant’s rental and credit history in making application decisions, and makes the risks of being a landlord too great for most small businesses.

I know that my wife and I have decided that if this sort of thing comes to pass, the amount that we would have to increase rent to compensate for the added risk would price our rental out of the market. This means that we would no longer be making enough money to make up for the higher risk that this would entail. For that reason, we would likely not renew tenants’ leases, clean the properties up, and then sell them. I don’t think that we would be alone in that.

It’s like the left is deliberately destroying the country.

Status Quo

Jack brings up some good points in comments when he points out that many people will want to just allow the commies to take over, in the hopes that they will get eaten last. They want to protect their pensions, their property.

Let me point out that we are just a few weeks into the takeover, and in that time, there are troops fortifying DC, the President has declared war on the NRA and gun owners, taken steps to shut down our oil industry, which has raised average gas prices by 25% nationwide. He has signed 55 Executive orders in all- just 28 days into his regime.

The US government, over the past year, printed or electronically created over 40% of all the dollars that have ever existed.  Ask yourself how long that can continue. A large part of our economy is at a standstill. Ford had to shut down its assembly lines. We aren’t producing anything except stimulus checks. Things are getting worse. The police in Portland are being used to keep people from raiding grocery store dumpsters.

The insane policies of the ‘great reset’ are killing the country’s economy. These are the canaries in the coal mine.

Killing the goose

New York has been bleeding residents for years. People fleeing the high taxes and restrictive laws for lower tax states like Florida has been going on for a long time. Now that COVID has taught companies that you don’t need to have your employees operate out of expensive Manhattan offices, that trend has accelerated. So how does New York respond to that?

As we all know, the Democrat answer to ANY problem is more taxes, so why not propose a 0.5% tax on every stock transaction? This was the entire plot of Office Space.

This will KILL the New York Stock Exchange. I hope it doesn’t come to Florida. See, the people who come here from New York haven’t learned their lesson on what voting for leftists does, so after moving here, they keep voting for the same politicians and policies that caused their problem to begin with.

To live here means listening to New York transplants constantly telling us how they “do things up north” and how much better things are “up north.” So, you ask, why did you leave? Then you get two answers: “It’s cold,” and “taxes.”

No shit.