tax the rich

March 3, 2024June 3, 2024

Rich Girl

You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
You can rely on the old man’s money
You can rely on the old man’s money
It’s a bitch, girl, but it’s gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
Say money but it won’t get you too far
Get you too far
Rich Girl by Hall and Oates

UPDATE 5.26.24: Article about the massive loss of wealth in Atlanta ($1.25 billion) from corporations buying property on Rough Draft.

UPDATE 6.2.24: Substack piece by Matt Stoller about the monopolies controlling housing begin BUSTED by the FBI this week. Hopefully you can read most of it – Substack is odd. (Outline: The corporation Cortland, that owns 85 THOUSAND rental units in 13 states, is being busted by the FBI for unfair practices and the software it uses, RealPage, is being investigated for cartel-like control over and price fixing via the rental companies who use it. I hope this leads to real legislation that bans corporations owning single family homes and limits the number of apartments as well. And I hope RealPage gets the shit kicked out of it and the owners jailed.)

I had an exchange with a wildly out of touch rich girl the other day on FB. A friend posted this meme:

I’ll post all the screen shots at the end, but for discussion, I’ll be copying her comments [MB] and posting my retorts [AP], not necessarily exactly as I did in the original post, but mostly copied and edited w/ this: [snipped]. Anything new in my retorts will be italic. The egregious part of her nonsense I’m responding to will be BOLD. Ok, got it? Here we go!

MB:
Are you okay with taking on the liability personally. Most LLCs can be pierced. Getting a loan for an individual in the 5-16 unit range is nearly impossible -> not to mention landlords don’t understand how to manage 50 units and below > causing distress properties. A corporation provides benefits to the employees and makes profit, but for the most part they do upkeep the property > which is something an individual won’t do because they just hire contractors.
Just food for thought. You would also have a bigger housing crisis in cities without corporates because there would not be any housing. An individual can’t have more than 4 mortgages…

AP:
The corporations now own most of the rental properties available ANYWHERE and they make it nearly impossible to rent. It took my friends 18 months and thousands in application and viewing fees (non refundable, of course) to find a place. They were routinely rejected [snipped].

It is fallacy that corporations take better care of properties! They’ve had to replace a toilet [snipped] themselves, because the corporate landlord refused to fix anything.

What you are missing is that THERE IS NO HOUSING AVAILABLE because the corporations won’t rent to anyone. There are so many empty houses that squatting has become quite common. My friends had TWO different houses lined up, only to find that squatters had set up housekeeping in them and the corporation could not evict them w/out due process. [snipped] The corps don’t care if they rent the houses or not. They are just a write off if they are empty or full of squatters.

If you think having corporations control 90% of rental homes and having no available affordable starter homes is of benefit, I invite you to cruise around S Dekalb and have a look at how successful that notion really is. If we lose this home, we are SCREWED. We’ll never find another house to rent because of our credit. Nevermind that we have never been late a single time in 10+ yrs, that won’t matter at all. We can’t afford to buy when everything is $400k+++. How that is better for us and everyone else in our position is beyond me. ??

Now is where the lecturing and amazingly tone deaf bullshit begins:
Continue reading “Rich Girl”

March 2, 2022

The Unattainable American Dream

This subject covers LOTS of aspects of what has been fed to us Americans over the generations. We’ve all been told:

“Buy a house! It is the American Dream! It’s the key to a secure future!”

Well, I’m here to tell you that this is a LIE. A bald-faced, full of shit LIE.

We did that. We bought a house in 2004. The market was hot, it was great for buyers and sellers. So we did it. We got a zero down loan (unheard of now) and moved in. We quickly started FIXING all the shit that needed fixing and took out an equity loan as well. Realtors and mortgage weasels will NOT tell you all the shit you’ll have to pay for when you buy a house. Like PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance). We had PMI, but refinanced after a few years and got rid of it. You can’t do that any more – more on that later. Anyway, we bought our tiny little 912sqft house in the ‘hood and we were happy as pigs in shit. We paid too much, but it was still affordable for us, our mortgage payment was $700-800/mo. Even then, rent was almost twice that.

SO, we got our little house, fixed it up and we loved it mightily.

Then the 2009 real estate crash happened. Our little house lost more than 60% of its value. We asked Wells Fargo to help us out with it, of course they told us to go fuck ourselves. (They were VERY rude, not saying GFY precisely, but RUDE. Wells Fargo can go fuck themselves!)

We were drowning in debt, the house was 60% under water and we’d had enough. So we opted to bankrupt out of all of it. We did the bankruptcy in 2010-11. We were trying to decide what to do: stay in ATL, move away, ???. So we kept paying the mortgage every month. Wells Fargo did nothing. The bankruptcy was discharged, so we were legally off the hook, but since the mortgage was cheap, we just kept paying.

So 2014 rolls around, and we decide that Maplehurst is not going to work with our side hustle, which is arcade games. I find this place in Tucker and we move. Our landlord didn’t mind the bankruptcy since our credit had recovered. Just TRY renting w/out perfect credit now. There are so few individual rental home owners now, it’s difficult to even rent a place to live due to corporate ownership and credit checks.

I read this article about housing and that is the impetus for this post. We got fucked by the real estate crash and it’s worse now that it was then. There are no zero down loans. PMI is PERMANENT (cannot be refinanced or dropped when equity is reached). Housing prices are up 30% and you better have that fat down payment if you want to buy an overpriced house. FHA loans are terrible to get and worse to pay – their PMI is the highest and permanent, which adds tens of thousands of dollars to your loan over time. So you NEVER get equity and only banks make wealth. The whole point of real estate is WEALTH. Can’t have the hoi polloi amassing wealth, now can we? OH NO.

For years, banks and ultra-elites (bankrolled by years of money-printing, corporate socialism, and bailouts) have been using their wealth to take control of the world and rent it back to us.
Apple did it with music.
Netflix did it with movies.
Nestle did it with water.
Uber did it with cars.
Airbnb hosts and landlords did it with houses.
The lecherous gig economy did it with employment.

Instead of buying and owning products, now we’re all just renting “services.” – Jared A. Brock

This right here. THIS IS WHAT I RAIL AGAINST DAILY. I’d also like to add Adobe did it with software and Microsoft and others followed suit. You don’t even buy SOFTWARE anymore!! That is fucked up, people.

It all started with real estate and this rental economy has spread across our whole economy. This is very, very bad. We are being reduced to serfs who exist at the whim of our corporate overlords. We rely on the rich corporations for housing, entertainment, food, software, EVERYTHING.

Young people (Ys, Zs, Zoomers) don’t even realise what’s happened. They are growing up in a rental economy, so they know nothing else. It’s fine with them to rent software and everything they need to live. They will likely never know the difference. In many ways, I am jealous of their ignorance.

America is in trouble. We’ve allowed the rich and corporations to literally buy our government. We allow them to erode our ability to have wealth of any sort, to go to school, to get healthcare, to RETIRE. We will NEVER retire. We will work until we’re dead.

What also chaps my ass is people who fail and have zero consequences. They are usually RICH.

For instance, a restaurant near here has failed and the investment group closed it and went bust. But no worries, the main guy got another investment group together real quick and they’ll be refurbing the space and reopening a new concept in a couple of months. NO CONSEQUENCES.

Wow, where were these motherfuckers when WE were trying with literally everything we had to open our dream? Hmm? WHERE? Oh, we aren’t a part of that elite group of rich fucking restauranteurs, so FUCK US.

This scenario is going on everywhere in America, right now, in myriad ways. The rich are telling us to go fuck ourselves for wanting to rise above our rank.

I fear that it’s gone too far in the US to reverse. We may have to move elsewhere just to get healthcare as we age. As it stands, we are treading water. Our jobs pay the bills, but that’s it. We can’t afford to sock away cash in the investments or IRA, so it’s all stagnant. And with the market crash that is coming, we’ll lose more of that small wealth. We’ve already lost about 30% of our investments over the last year or so (2021). We’ll lose more before it’s done. I’m here to tell you that you cannot “retire” on $100k. You cannot.

I don’t know what we’ll do, but I can tell you that we’ve let go of “The American Dream” and pretty much any dream of being independent – as in, working for ourselves. We just don’t have the cash to do it. Meanwhile, the rich fail, lose a million $ and just keep going. IT IS MADDENING.

This is certainly not how I’d planned to live out my old age. Not at all. So think about this when you vote. Yes, the Democrats are pretty spineless and mealy mouthed, but it’s better than fascism. All we can hope for is stopping fascism and at least being able to stay here and not go through the extreme stress of moving overseas. But I just don’t know. And THAT is what eats at me every day.

February 13, 2022February 13, 2022

Eat the Rich

I reposted an article about Elon Musk on FB the other day that rendered a friend (who worships Musk unto a God) apoplectic with rage. A scuffle ensued and I deleted the whole thing. BUT I think I want to write about it here because I have my own issues with Musk and the rest of the rich cunts who pay no taxes and generally tra-la-la their way through life without so much as a hint of trouble or disaster.

The FB post was referring to the lawsuit currently working against Tesla for racist policies, segregated facilities and harassment.

I asserted that Musk was a rich asshole from a rich family, who wouldn’t have shit without the advantages he had growing up. Of course, the friend denied all that and insists that Musk is a great guy and the Lord and Saviour of Humanity™. Sigh.

Musk’s family was very well off in S Africa and did, indeed, own part of an emerald mine. Here is part of a Forbes article from 2014 (cached on wayback, since it’s been scrubbed from the active internet) where Musk talks about the emerald mine. So that is TRUE. It is not clear how much money they actually had or how much was from the mine, but they were well off by all measures.

It is difficult to find articles of value about Musk, since his media team is good at their jobs and have erased any and all evidence of Musk’s privilege from the internet. There’s a lot of chatter on Quora, but that is far from trustworthy. Here is a quora discussion of whether Musk was born into wealth that is pretty coherent.

So, let’s just say OK, he was upper middle class. Fine. BUT he is still white and he grew up in Apartheid S Africa, which greatly enhances his privilege beyond just money. He also got very fucking lucky with the dot com boom, which is how he went from a broke student to millionaire.

I stand by my contempt of Musk and all the other .1% who hoard the world’s money. I don’t give a single damn if they had a typical college experience or not, or were raised rich or not, they are still hoarding money that could do a helluva lot more good than electric cars and sending rich fucks into space.

Bezos, Musk and the rest pay practically no taxes, while we struggle to keep the bills paid and pay 30% of our meager income to taxes. It is NOT RIGHT. Have a look at this ProPublica article that shows the taxes the rich cunts DON’T PAY. Musk has averaged 3.x% up until this year, where he’s paying full taxes – and is crowing about it. The only reason he’s paying now is because he’s been called out for NOT PAYING. And, again, his media team has made sure to keep the facts about his tax avoidance buried so he can present himself as a nice guy and an everyman. He is not, that is PR bullshit.

Musk and Bezos are rich fucks who honestly could not possibly care less about the rest of humanity. They care about MONEY. They don’t pay taxes because they own the politicians who ensure that they don’t and never will. After all, the politicians are ALSO RICH FUCKS who like money.

I have nothing but contempt for all these fuckers. It’s real fucking easy to live a life where there are small, if any consequences. Lose a million? Eh, no biggie. Bankrupt out your busted ass company? No biggie. No consequences when you’re rich. I’d like to see any of these cunts live on $40k. JUST TRY IT. They’ve never known the struggle and they never will. THAT IS THE PROBLEM. When rich people run things, that’s when all the things that make a first world country start getting cut in the name of capitalism. Why do we need daycare? Why do we need arts in schools? Why do we need unemployment benefits? Why should we take care of the old and infirm? All those things do is “waste” money!! WE LIKE MONEY. All that stuff is CLEARLY socialism! We don’t want THAT. Paying taxes??? NOOOOO! We don’t want THAT. You peons pay the taxes, not US.

When the government feels that the peons need to pay taxes on unemployment and other government assistance, you know things have gone awry.

Our tax bill was almost $6k last year. We are still paying it off. We make about $45-50k for two of us. And we had to PAY an additional $6k because I got unemployment. THAT IS FUCKED UP.

And that is why we need to depose our rich masters and divvy up the spoils. Just a fraction of their hoarded wealth could end hunger for the whole goddam Earth!! MAKE THEM PAY THEIR SHARE. Or set up the guillotines. Whichever. I wouldn’t shed a tear for any of the super rich. They certainly shed no tears for US as we struggle along, nearing “retirement” age, knowing that we’ll never retire, nor will we ever get to travel and see the world like we’d planned. Nope, the closest we get to seeing the world is the Apple TV screen saver – and that, my bitches, is the true cost of these assholes hoarding money. We will NEVER get the life we wanted. None of us will. The American dream is a LIE and working more won’t help shit. The system is rigged and we will stay in the caste in which we ended up. People like Musk or even Zuckerberg, who got really lucky in the dot com era are just that: LUCKY. You can’t plan your life on LUCK. We are middle aged with shitty income. We’ve had only bad luck when it came to trying to have our own business(es). No one backed us up and we had no golden parachute to ease the pain of losing most of our money. Nope, we had to start over with shitty jobs and less than half the income we had. I promise you, none of the super rich have ever had that experience.

Since these people have never struggled, they simply can’t understand why they need to step up. No, it’s the rest of us that need to work harder, right? This attitude is pervasive in America.

The French Revolution was born of the people being sick of royalty hoarding all the money while they starved. Cobblestones flew, heads rolled. AND IT WORKED. I think America needs to figure out how to achieve getting rid of the rich in government and making them pay their share in general.

I just don’t think we have the stomach for it. Americans are being goaded into the Republican “we hate everyone who is not an ignorant hillbilly” camp, the Progressive “rich people will save us” camp or the Democrat “OMG I can’t deal with this shit” camp. The country is fracturing as we speak.

I don’t know what to expect, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t good. So we just keep swimming. We endure. And that is no way to live. :(