What’s Gotten Rotten in our Income and Affordability?

One recent writing prompt on my Word Press channel–was to describe, “What would I do if I lost all my possessions?” I started to write about the two men I see here on Oahu that were fortunate enough to survive the Maui wind fires from Hurricane Dora, and are basically having to start over here on the neighboring island of Oahu. To be sure, the outreach to Maui fire victims has been somewhat reassuring, yet, no matter how I would try to capture how I feel about this whole thing, something just isn’t right.

At first blush, I would say, “Buy more crap over again!” –but for those who had captured the American Dream at some time in their life, the start over again seems more like becoming homeless without hope.

Then I remembered this recent video from Michael Bordenaro on YouTube–who is one of my favorite channel hosts– who basically captures the “theft” of losing everything in a slow-motion train wreck in our dollar’s purchasing power.

In this video, with some great examples from his viewers, are the stories of buying a house more than 20 years ago such as a Publix market grocery store employee, and showing what that salary would need to be today with respect to inflation, and then plugging in the same numbers for house prices, and showing that the average house price in the same area where they were bought in the seventies, eighties, or nineties, are now double or triple the price adjusted for inflation. How did this come to be?

My guess is financialization*, as defined by Wikipedia as:

*Financialization (or financialisation in British English) is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.

Did we vote on spending in the Viet Nam war or for the decade in Afghanistan? Did we approve the 100 million-dollar-a-month spending limit on wars that “don’t count” because the are too small? Are we now being force-fed to overspend more than 100 Billion on an Ukraine war we never endorsed?

Dear David Lin and Professor Hanke, (YouTube)

Could you do a video with John Williams of shadow stats to describe what is happening here to our ability to possess a home? Would we storm the capitol and ask the Veep to stop the election results? Oh, we already tried that. And that man was our President, who’s now being tried for inflating real estate values.

Hmmm.

Sounds familiar.